Anne Garvey
Keep It Together: Reception
Manna Gallery
Oakland
Jan. 20, 2024
If you were to have driven past this particular block on 25th Street, just off Telegraph, on this unassuming, rainy weekend, you might not have clocked the steady crowd of art-goers passing through the maze of galleries hidden among the blocks of warehouses. If you’d ducked inside, you’d have found a brisk hive of foot traffic. It spoke to the creative activity that Oaklanders seemed hungry for on Saturday afternoon.
Tucked into a corner of these galleries is Oakland native Anne Garvey’s exhibit, Keep It Together, a series of paintings she has done of her earlier sculptures — a creative puzzle you’ll want to stop and unwrap. Or, at least try to.
Garvey, whose art is “focused on anxiety, trauma, and resilience,” originally created three-dimensional works from yarn, ribbon, and string wrapped around or among objects, along with torn and reassembled journal and calendar pages. Then she created paintings of these works.
To create a two-dimensional perspective of a work with dimension and weight and gravity has the effect of a meta-meditation on art. Whereas, I imagine the sculptural works felt solid and somewhat substantial, the paintings of them feel as pliable and shifting as moods. They show yarn wrapped around and through legs, or barely perceptible strips of white ribbon, layered and bleeding into the cream of the canvas, or tangles of red ribbon hanging like seaweed against pastel backdrops. They evoke the pliability of art, the inscrutability of emotions that we use to wrap around or cover up people, things, lives, stories.
Garvey’s work gently pulls your gaze inward. You might wonder what the ribbons and lines and strings might be hiding, or wonder how they’re prone to tautness and slackness with every twist and tendril. Garvey says that her paintings are “an exploration into the delicate balance between maintaining composure and navigating the emotions that define our shared human experience.”
Even if the colors are light, wandering the small room, I felt loosely tethered to something somber and delicate, soft and silent. I felt driven to respect whatever was hidden, to leave what was tangled as it was, and to admire its fragility.
Garvey’s paintings seem to lead viewers like a string towards her aim of representing the self-reflective process… [and the] the possibilities for deeper, psychological connections.” She wants viewers to contemplate our shared struggles. In doing so, you might also find yourself untangling the particular threads you struggle with, as I did. Gazing on her work seemed to promote the cathartic work of my mind at untangling stray thoughts troubling me that day.
There’s another, larger painting with bolder colors; dark, black strips of cloth with thinner, more delineated strips in soft pinks and cream colors, centered against a layered backdrop of deep copper and gold. In my mind, it hints at the bold, erotic backgrounds by Gustav Klimt. But this is what’s left of the passion, what’s deconstructed into sparser, barren moods. It’s as if it offers a vision of the aftermath of a kiss.
