Camille Rose Garcia is a Los Angeles-based lowbrow artist. She produces paintings, prints and sculpture in a gothic, "creepy" cartoon style. She cites as influences Walt Disney and Philip K. Dick.
Biography
Garcia's parents met in music school. Her father was a film producer and anti-Vietnam activist, and her mother was a muralist from Northern California. Garcia's parents divorced when she was young and her mother raised her and her sister in close proximity to Disneyland. Camille Rose Garcia received her Master of Fine Arts degree at University of California at Davis in 1994 and her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1992. Six years of art school left her disillusioned and bitter, so she decided to move back home to Huntington Beach, California, and started a band, The Real Minx. Garcia's work has appeared in Modern Painters, Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, Flaunt, and BLAB! magazines. She also contributed work to ohGr's second album, SunnyPsyOp. She has published three books, The Saddest Place on Earth,, The Magic Bottle: A BLAB! Storybook, and Tragic Kingdom . She illustrated a version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in 2010. "The original illustrations by John Tenniel have always been some of my favorites," said Garcia in a recent interview when asked about the book. "I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations." Her work also appears in the permanent collections of LACMA and the San Jose Museum of Art. On November 2, 2013, Garcia was part of a four-woman show in Los Angeles called "Black Moon" with fellow female artists, Jessicka Addams, Elizabeth McGrath and Marion Peck.
Collections
Critical reception
Paula Rogers, a KQED art critic and self-styled fan of Camille Rose Garcia, reviewed Garcia’s mid-career retrospective, Tragic Kingdom: The Art of Camille Rose Garcia at the San Jose Museum of Art:
"Garcia’s pretty pictures specific meaning and specific context…their insistent vagueness, smugness, blanket pronouncements, lack of nuance and grating self-righteousness add up to a static portrait / shallow response to something complex: I get it; things are bad. It's disappointing to find out that the impetus for these works isn't skillful."
Exhibitions
2000 - The Happiest Place on Earth - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2001 - The Soft Machine - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2002 - Retreat Syndrome - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2003 - Operation:Opticon - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2004 - Ultraviolence Land - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2005 - Plan B - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2005 - Dreamtime Escape Plan - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2006 - Subterranean Death Clash - Jonathan LeVine Gallery 2007 - Doomcave Daydreams -Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2008 - Ambien Somnambulants - Jonathan LeVine Gallery 2009 - Down the Rabbit Hole - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2010 - The Hydra of Babylon - Merry Karnowsky Gallery 2011 - Sneewittenhen und die Schwarze Lagune - Michael Kohn Gallery 2013 - Down the Rabbit Hole - The Walt Disney Family Museum 2013 - Black Moon - Sloan Fine Arts 2014 - Black Moon NYC - Sloan Fine Arts
