Garrett Gould is an artist living and working in Boston. He is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA and concentration in Sculpture. He has a studio in the South End down the street from the SoWa district in Boston. He is exhibited nationally with recent exhibitions at The Aviary, Jamaica Plain, MA; Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles CA; Seymour2017, Los Angeles CA; How’s Howard?, Boston MA; FJORD Gallery, Philadelphia PA; and Lens Gallery, Boston MA. He also runs European, a project space in the 4th floor bathroom of a studio building in the South End. The space hosts two artists for each exhibition. The project’s program will focus on the relationship of the two artists, their work, and the intersections between private and borrowed space.

Garrett Gould’s work is interested in the gaps through which sensations, realness, and familiarity enter and exit his practice. He believes these elements necessary to a respiration that articulates his practice, a process of objects leading sculptures and sculptures following objects. He has made a diagram to help himself and others see this process in more detail (Seen to the left, last image of gallery). Gould wants his work to move forward through the path laid out in the diagram while moving in and out of sculpture, offering the viewer a form that maps one’s sense of familiarity and realness when looking at the work. As a maker, he wants to make forms that push and pull on these gaps.

Garrett’s work employs themes such as humor, violence, and illusion to retain the shape of memories that characterize the form while simultaneously undermining the expectation of the function and purpose within it. This subversion highlights discrepancies between one’s sense of realness and familiarity. The ability of these themes to retain the shape of memories combined with legibility of the intuition behind the work introduces the possibility of the eventual union of those two senses. Can one laugh and also understand? Can it be used and also disappear? Can moves themselves disappear?

These questions allow the forces of evocation and illustration to push inward and outward along the passage of time. This inward and outward movement is a process that disrupts the course of naming the graphic and sculptural decisions in the work. This results in an inability to fully map them as cultural marker and leaves the work in a state of constant suspension. Scale, replication, surface treatments, and faux-ness are tools Garrett uses in his process that reveal the space between naming and meaning in which the work is suspended. This encourages ambiguity in both the identification and interpretation of the form. The work becomes both like and unlike itself through a back and forth between an impression and a subversion. The persistent and fluctuating unease from this disorientation requires the viewer to resolve incongruities between what was evoked through making and what is illustrated from memory.

To see more of his work, visit his website: www.garrett-gould.com