This installation of pictures and video is the culmination of my research and development of several separate but closely related groups of images. It is the first time I have attempted to bring them together to make a larger statement. While some of my work over the years has an element of humor and while I always intend to evoke/elicit some form of beauty, there is also a consistently dark side to my work. The four series of pictures represented in this show all attempt to communicate some aspect of my sense of humanity’s increasing alienation from the self and from the natural world. As our world of knowledge advances in so many ways, especially technologically and scientifically, our core human condition does not really change. We struggle with the timeless longings for love and communion/connection and impulses of competition and conflict. As populations grow and live in increasingly close proximity, and as our ability to do harm becomes easier and more lethal, we are confronted with ever present existential dilemmas of our own making. The few images in my show with people in them are called “Idealists.” I have always been fascinated by the way American advertising presents interactions between people, especially in how it idealizes relations between the different races in America. In America we are influenced from a very young age at school and through various media to believe in what is called The American Dream: “the ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” The reality is more complex. These images are appropriated from catalogue advertisements for protective glasses for workers. I have radically altered the images to isolate the individuals in a kaleidoscopic digital universe. Around that same time I began photographing and collecting information graphics. These schematic drawings have been around for a long time but have proliferated with the increased interconnectedness of populations, a result of accelerated globalization. The drawings are indicative of the difficulties of verbal communication in an increasingly interconnected world and help to bridge the many language barriers. Besides being informative, they are sometimes beautiful. They are also at times confusing. Here I take them out of their original contexts, alter them and layer them to evoke a sense of “information overload.” The smallest photographs in the show, and the video, were taken in abandoned corporate office spaces. One of the jobs that allows me to work as an artist is installing art for corporate art collections in New York City. During the financial crisis of 2008 I lost most of that work as companies cut their budgets. Then several years later, as these same companies were cutting jobs and abandoning office space, I was employed to remove the same art that I had installed years earlier. I was attracted to the silent, minimalist spaces that had once been centers of economic power and ambition. Landscape has always played some part in my work. Personally, direct connection with nature is a necessity for my physical, mental and emotional well-being. (Recently I have studied horticulture and garden design, and one of my passions is designing and tending my own garden in Brooklyn, New York.) In these two, altered landscape photographs I have attempted to capture a sense of how technology, urbanization and ecological destruction separates us from our origin in nature. Both images were taken at an empty lot in my neighborhood. During the several years that it was abandoned and bits of garbage accumulated, nature began to come back and take over. (The site is now a building of luxury apartments.) The largest image is a composite of many photographs that are automatically “stitched” together by computer software. Instead of cropping out the rough edges, I decided to keep the evidence of nature being filtered through technology.

Peter Garfield
May 2018