Mariah Garnett at Human Resources
510 Bernard St, Los Angeles, CA, 90012.
October 8-19, 2010.
Opening Reception: October 8,
Closing Reception: October 19
info@humanresourcesla.com
213-290-4752
Gallery hours are 12-6 pm, Thursday through Saturday and by appointment

Human Resources are pleased to host: Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin a 16mm installation by Mariah Garnett.

“Doesn’t she look like me?”
– Peter Berlin.

Garnett deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, Garnett highlights the pervasiveness of this practice alongside its ultimate inevitable failure.

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin: The Remix depicts evidence of a brush with a deity through a 16mm sculpture in which two projectors loop 100ft of hand painted film. The image, the artist posing as Peter Berlin, is splintered and refracted off the surface of a mirror ball, spewing out across the walls of the gallery. The piece recasts obvious markers of identity politics in a formalist context and highlights the labor of narcissism.

Also on view is a three-part film, Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin (Parts 1, 2 and 3), in which Garnett moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 70’s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden. The film guides the viewer through the process of making contact with a figure who exists only in his own photographs.

Mariah Garnett is pursuing her MFA at Calarts in Film/Video. Her work has shown internationally in festivals and galleries including: Acuna Hansen Gallery (Los Angeles), Montehermoso Cultural Center (Vittoria, Spain), Rencontres Internacionales (Paris, Madrid), Gender-Bender (Milan) and The Los Angeles Film Festival.

Human Resources is a team of creative individuals which seeks to broaden engagement with contemporary and conceptual art, with an emphasis on performative and underexposed modes of expression.