- Stop Looking at This JPEG: Seriously, you can’t understand why Tatiana Garmendia’s art is so good by looking at this JPEG.
I rarely go to Patricia Cameron Gallery, and I was walking by it on the street the other day, not intending to go in, when Patricia Cameron smiled graciously and waved to me, and her kindness made me feel even guiltier, because even though the art hadn’t looked great in the JPEGs I saw online, the concept of the show interested me, and I felt frustrated all over again about not having time for everything, and I shuffled in dutifully—and the JPEGs were wrong. Dead wrong. Tatiana Garmendia has made some of the most gorgeous things. The main subjects of the exhibition are her erotic drawings that are burned into paper, not drawn on, using a tool that’s like a pen, but on fire. She paints between the burn lines in pastel watercolor, in a process she describes as cooling the heat of the burns. You can almost hear sizzling.
Garmendia has been living and working in Seattle since 1993. She teaches at Seattle Central Community College, and a couple of her pieces in the Wing Luke Museum’s group show this summer, Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century, made an impression for being both unsettling and lovely. They were overlays of love and war, six-foot ink paintings of pietàs set in the ongoing Iraq war. The Madonnas wore dark, shadowy, realistically rendered burqas—such drapery—and the Christs were uniformed soldiers in camo and boots. Prayer-carpet motifs in pinkish red swirled beneath the figures, and calligraphy in English and Arabic quoted from popular songs by Courtney Love, Linkin Park, and the Chemical Brothers.
Garmendia has technical chops, her influences are drawn from a passport full of stamps, and she isn’t afraid to take on the biggest imaginable subjects. Cameron explained that Garmendia was born in Cuba, where her parents were jailed, where she saw terrible things. For her, war, torture, and love come together, and they are real…
