Rising Stars: Meet Richard Garet

I was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1972. I immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela where I lived from 1986-1996. After becoming a Venezuelan citizen I immigrated once more to NYC in 1996, became a US citizen and after 25 years my family and I relocated to Fort Lauderdale.

I received an MFA from Bard College and I developed my contemporary art practice there in NYC. My work is multimedia with a great emphasis on sound and visual practices. Everything is very interconnected and I do not give hierarchy to one medium over the other. My MFA was very interdisciplinary at Bard College and perhaps the two most consistent elements in my work are time and the performative nature of the works.

I also work a lot with the static image which makes constant reference to painting (painting was my first academic training and it is deeply embedded in all my practice, informing aesthetics, presentation and scale through more contemporary means). As a result I have developed extensive bodies of photographic works, canvas prints, and mixed media.

I feel I have always faced cultural challenges, meaning that moving from country to country felt challenging to adapt and to fit in. To a point of always feeling like an immigrant even when visiting my native country. At this point, I have lived 13 years in Uruguay, 10  years in Venezuela and 26 years in the USA.

Financial struggle has always been present. First, as an immigrant while working very hard to live day by day and slowly progress and eventually being able to go to college and receive my degrees and improve my life. I have faced financial challenges around my career as an artist and being able to finance and produce my work.

I’m a multimedia artist. I started as a musician around 15 and I was part of many music bands. In the 90s, I developed an interest in art especially painting and eventually, I went to school for it and developed a practice as well as a painter. I realized that I was not interested in the idiomatic aspects of music such as harmony, tonality and melody but that instead I was interested in sound as a material. From painting also I evolved towards moving image and digital photography and after many years eventually everything intertwined and became integrated. Although I do not paint traditionally anymore, I always claim that I learn to be an artist and to see as a painter and painting always informs my visual work. But it does not stop there because I work interdisciplinarily and I have developed methods to use sound to inform the visuals or visuals to create sonifications and work with a wide range of analog to digital media. From very simple systems to working with programming and generative art.

Often I have been quite recognized as a Sound Artist due to my long trajectory but also because I was part of Soundings: A Contemporary Score at MoMA, NY in 2013. That was the very first Sound Art exhibition ever presented at MoMA. Also, at Midnight Moment in Times Square, NY displaying one work for a month on the screens of TSq in 2015. And many more. But I have equally participated in many other shows with visual pieces and audiovisual as well.

My materials emerge from ontological investigations of background noise and the decadence and-decay of technological utilities. I seek to invert the normative function of background noise from unconscious status to active presence. The images and objects in my work stem from processes and experimentations applied to both outmoded and current technological media that emulate situations that translate material sources into abstractions.

My works embrace the objectification of the ordinary, repurposed technologies, transposition, articulation of space, nuances of perception, and extended techniques applied to time-based practice. Such creations, both conceptual in origin and experimental, embody contemporary life as a filtered experience. I emphasize two notions from this experience that inform my work; debris from constant cultural bombardment and the experience of commodification, both being considered to be sensory overload.

I find further inspiration from observing isolated situations of everyday life and from interactions with found materials that explore further possibilities of automation, discarded utility, function-and-defunctionalization, commodity, and environment.

Richard Garet holds an MFA from Bard College, NY. Recent projects include CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition 2017, Florida, USA; RED-Splice, Fridman Gallery, NYC; SOUND ONE, Cindy Rucker, NYC; Periscope, Zipper Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Screen Memory, Galerie Burster, Berlin; Midnight Moment, site specific work created for the electronic billboards of Times Square, NY; Alusiones, Carmen Araujo Arte, Hacienda de la Trinidad, Caracas, Venezuela; Meta-residue: Input Material, Space, Studio 10, NY; Theorem: You Simply Destroy the Image I Always Had of Myself, Maná Contemporary, NJ; Adrenalina, Red Bull Station, Sau Paulo, Brazil; International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia; Bioderivas, Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Tenerife, Spain; Queens International, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Soundings: a Contemporary Score, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Extraneous to the Message, Julian Navarro Projects, NY; The Spacious Now and the Scale of the Instantaneous, Studio 10, NY; 5×5 Real Unreal, Museum of Art Acarigua-Araure, Venezuela; EAC: Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay; Fine Arts Museum of Montreal; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain; Art Museum of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and El Museo del Barrio, NYC. His sonic constructions have been published through sound art labels such as 23five, And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-V, Leerraum, White_Line Editions, OBS, Line Imprint, and Contour Editions.”

Moving from NYC to South Florida has been a wonderful change but I still struggle with getting out there. Much has to do with covid and how the pandemic has modified all our approaches to living and working but I feel optimistic. In the meantime, I have been working in the studio and enjoying the clean ocean air, beach, and fantastic weather.