The Ballrooms of Mars
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Dorothy Circus Gallery ROME presents
The Ballrooms of Mars
Camille Rose Garcia Solo Show
- FEBRUARY 24th, 2018 - APRIL 7th, 2018 -
Private Preview: Friday February 23rd, 2018 || 5 - 8 pm
Public Opening: Saturday February 24th, 2018 || 5 - 8 pm
Dorothy Circus Gallery inaugurates 2018 with the brand new solo show by Camille Rose Garcia, entitled "The Ballrooms of Mars". This exhibition introduces a new cycle dedicated to the six prime movers of Pop Surrealism, presented in London last October 2017, who will now display a series of original solo shows in their Roman premises. Based in Los Angeles, California, Garcia stands out as one of the most renowned and beloved pop surrealist artists worldwide. She produces paintings, prints and sculptures in a gothic, “horror” cartoonish style, which release a sense of adorability and inherent creepiness. For her debut with Dorothy Circus Gallery, Garcia proposes a series of 16 unique works that refer to her influences and primordial inspirations (mysteries of Nature, music, art), but most importantly is inspired by her new researches.
With this exhibition, indeed, Garcia marks the beginning of a new path of artistic investigations, entering a new phase of her career. By mixing colours with lines and stark contrasts, the artist invites the public to enter a new territory and to walk the path that leads through imagination, beauty, the critique of the every day and the vibration of music that accompanies us every day through emotions and feelings.
"The Ballrooms of Mars" explores the outer space dimension, the mysterious features of Space and the universal language of nature made of “patterns in the vibrations of sound.” We are led in a journey through distant and magical dimension, in which we encounter mysterious creatures and Ziggy Stardust-like characters – born from Camille Rose Garcia’s imagination but also undoubtedly influenced by popular heroes like David Bowie. Music echoes in all Garcia’s artworks, in which the figures hold and virtually play LPs and record players, remarking a suggestive musical iconography that inhabits the paintings. The title of the show itself," The Ballrooms of Mars", comes from a T.Rex song from his 1972 album “The Slider.”
The cosmic energy that flows within music and within human souls creates an emotional bond that can be evinced by the electric and glittery palette used and the captivating atmosphere of the environments depicted. Space is represented not as a dark place, but as an extremely colourful dimension. In this continuous movement of energies, our inner beings awake to participate in a universal dance of sensuous and emotional impulses. L.A.’s musical counterculture, too, becomes evident through the rock and roll sounds of these images – sounds that are also constantly present through the artist’s creative process. In Garcia’s ballroom we dance to futuristic tunes, we jump from planet to planet, exploring like the Little Prince the secrets and wonders of each place of the journey. In each artwork the spectator can interact with a planet - all of them personified as Gods, “coming together every 25.000 years (The Procession of the Equinoxes) to dance an elaborate dance and play music together, bringing their own sounds from distant planets.”These gods look evanescent and bodily at the same time; they, like ancient Greek divinities, represent a point of convergence between humans and extraterrestrial. They listen to music, interact with one another and travel like people on the Earth, nonetheless, they emanate an aura of magic that echoes in the concert of sounds springing from their planets. While stardust flows in the atmosphere, Garcia’s works enchant the viewers and challenge their imagination to find, eventually, those hidden worlds that dwell within their subconscious.
Camille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. Her stunningly subversive images define her signature style based on elaborate socio-political narratives that the artist hides beneath layers and nuances of fairytale charm, which subtly criticise the failures of the capitalist utopias celebrated by American countercultures.William Burroughs’s cut-up writings and surrealist movies, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons, influence Garcia’s layered, fragmented descriptive scenes. The surfaces of her paintings are worn-out asif layers have repeatedly been painted over, alluding to medieval motifs orto 1950s movies. As a result, her figures become remote cousins of classic fairy-tales and early-twenty century cartoons, inhabiting the bed lands of the artist’s twisted mind. Garcia’s works grotesque yet persuasively beautiful, explore obscurity and reflect the artist’s childhood memories, which seem tobe warm and misty, on the one side, fictional mirrors of the counterculture of Los Angeles that was somewhat ominous and violent, on the other side. As she said during an interview, “things that make me mad motivate me”.
Garcia’s work has been displayed internationally in galleries and museums and featured in numerous magazines including Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, and Modern Painter. Her artworks have been exposed in the Los Angeles County Museum and in San Jose Museum of Art’s, which held Garcia’s retrospective “Tragic Kingdom”. Garcia has also collaborated with The Walt Disney Family Museum for the exhibition “Camille Rose Garcia: Down the Rabbit Hole,” where she showcased a series of Disney-inspired illustrations. Among her great exhibitions there are also her participation in“Art from the New World”at the Bristol City Museum, “Pop Surrealism”, held at the Museum of Visual Arts Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy, “Turn the Page”at The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and “Cross The Streets” held at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy in 2017.
