Larry Garmezy "Fractured" Read the foreword to his exhibition by Karen Schiff, MFA / PhD

Fractured - Larry Garmezy, October 5 - 31
Exhibition Catalog Foreword - Seeing through Stone
by  Karen L. Schiff, M.F.A. / Ph.D.

You never know who might come up with a new way to see, or to see an artwork. In his new exhibition at Archway Gallery, Fractured, I think that artist Larry Garmezy has done both. If you consider that our habits of seeing the world — and the scholarly discourses that can guide our ways of interpreting artworks — sometimes can stand as firm as stone walls, this is quite a feat.
 
I met Larry when he was doing research related to this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I was employed by the museum’s Hirsch Library, and was working in the stacks when his book requests came through. I was thrilled to see someone asking for the very titles that I’ve also been consulting while developing new interpretations of Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When I brought the books to the reading room, I also came to meet the person behind the request.
 
The researcher I met was, like me, an artist with training outside of art and art history: Larry Garmezy is a former geologist who has long practiced photography. And he had also come up with what sounded to me like a plausible and innovative twist on early Cubist paintings. Larry thought that the angularly divided forms in these artworks could have been influenced by the experience of looking through pre-industrial-age, 17th century hand-blown glass, and he wanted to find out if any critic of Picasso’s work had mentioned this idea. Larry’s training had primed him to see significance where others had not: ​​original windows ​i​n ​o​ld buildings relate strongly to geology, because they are made of stone, albeit ground to sand and melted into glass. Yet Larry’s work in artistic photography also meant that he didn’t get stuck behind the “stone wall” of regarding ​such window​s as geological phenomen​a or even as architectural feature​s. While ​a window of course admits light into ​a​ building’s interior​ room (also called a camera), Larry also perceived that this specific type of glass can be a tool, or a lens, for reconfiguring our view of the exterior world.
 
The effect of this lens is that figures seen walking on the far side of older windows appear, as Larry says, “fractured” and “faceted.” Though it is impossible to prove that similar-looking Cubist figures derived from those artists having studied the world through medieval or otherwise lumpy glass, Larry’s art historical proposal still has provocative potential. So, he used this possible connection to inspire several of his photos of subjects painted by the early Cubists. And though I respect and applaud Larry’s dedication to researching historical contexts, I also appreciate his updates. He takes his photographs through “lenses” that look like old windows yet are newly, precisely crafted, and he uses that technique to explore a wide range of subjects. He repurposes medieval​, pre-industrial, and fin de siècle traditions into cityscapes and a thrilling fluidity of vision, so that both his subjects and compositional effects address our current moment. 

Ultimately, I see Larry Garmezy’s work in dialogue with the visual innovations — and the contemporary, compelling questions about identity — created by David Hockney’s collaged “joiner photographs” and Chuck Close’s paintings of sectioned, abstracted, fluid faces. Larry, the former geologist, invites us to look afresh at the world through the stone lens of ground glass, to break through the walls of our visual routines.

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