The Polyphonic Fortress is a shimmering, ethereal love letter to the landscapes of California, from the smallest of her inhabitants and the world within them, to the greater Universes beyond. It is a record of the artist’s dreams, a spell to cure time, and a magic fort of blankets to keep the crystalline perfection of nature protected and unchanged.
Since the early years of her solo career with KP Projects (Merry Karnowsky) in 1999, decades of Garcia’s prolific, boldly distinct, and metamorphic paintings have beckoned to the contemporary figurative and narrative aesthetic that came to define the Lowbrow / Pop Surreal movement.
Working from her studio in the Northern California coastal forest, where she has now lived longer than her urban upbringing in native Los Angeles, it seems inevitable that “Landscape” would influence the artist’s work and form a symbolic language of its own.Ruminating on the loss of a forest the size of Philadelphia from a 2023 wildfire in Garcia’s immediate area, a nebulous loss that magnifies the collective wildfires eating up the California landscape, the 10 paintings on panel and 17 watercolor works on paper are a profound study in personal and collective loss, and a hope for transcendence.