“Contact” a solo exhibition with Brent Garbowski “installed” on May 16th and gates “open” through June 27, 2020.

Purchase work on Artfare here.

In the midst of quarantine and social distancing, Elijah Wheat Showroom presents an installation viewable through the gallery window, in tandem with a checklist of the works on Artfare. “Contact”, a solo exhibition by Brent R. Garbowski, touches on recent events that bring us out of physicality and into virtual domains of the body. We’ve had access to these domains for years, yet this facility of access finally activates in the face of the need to come together and be connected.

Garbowski takes from life, and gives an alternative understanding to objects. He states: “Contact begins with a pick up truck I inherited from my father.” Works in the show are casts from the varied dents on the body of that vehicle, whether from minor accidents or more impactful events. He created ‘coherent’ bronze forms from the consequences of these impacts, thereby “embellishing the violence we did not avoid.” The bronzes transfer vehicular trauma into seductive, semi-abstract shapes. Garbowski continues: “The material of “Contact” is not bronze, but damage; damage is not violent, but beautiful. These emotional scabs articulate the subject’s struggle to reckon history.” The records of physical altercations lie on the plinth, hovering low to the floor. The show translates the body of the truck into a different kind of body, molding into an ever-changing reminder of our fortitude for adaptation.

Alongside the bronze sculptures are “Manifold Cabinets” covertly positioned inside gallery walls, with an eerie green glow seeping from the creases of their closed panes. The cabinets are locked. There is a portal to a key; yet the key is never for the viewer, collector or gallery. It is only for the artist to hold. The insides possess an uncanny haunted space which infiltrates the gallery, as if it’s always been there. Here it is, just positioned quietly, haunting the space and emanating the mystery of that which is encased. Is it a body behind the door? Is it uranium? Diamonds? LEDS? An alien form? Its contents are classified as technology’s yellow-green hue seeps through seams, never granting access for a reveal. The keys are gone, the artist’s ‘campy horror aesthetics’ run deep in the habitat, further pushed out of view of a “normal”-times glance.

On the lower section of the cabinets, a text ‘for tomorrow’ is pasted.“Just as the manifold box is no longer what it seems,” it reads, “the electrician’s stickers are modulated into narrative fragments.” What does it say? We want to engage. We are looking for real-life experiences.

As death and decay conjure supernatural narratives, these apparitions won’t let us live peacefully. Garbowski’s sculptures and boxes are incarnations not of sadness, but of grief. The painbody is represented in these grief rituals, particular to each of us. And we are reminded that grief doesn’t represent the mourning of an ending, but a presentation of the [presence] that keeps us alive.