Brent R. Garbowski (They/Them)

Brent R. Garbowski is a queer American artist living and working in the UK.  Born in the midwest, their work mines American iconography to explore humorous narratives of decline and the rise and fall of American exceptionalism.  Garbowski studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and works primarily in Art, Fashion and Film.  Currently single.

In the drawings I use text and images as signifiers of hope and longing.  Parts of the drawings are then cut out generating negative spaces or void spaces that lack any visual information.  These works seek to mine the sentimental iconography of hope and invert it into the abyss.  The process of making a drawing is a process of hoping.  When we place the pen to the paper we hope that this drawing is going to be a good one.  Professionally, we might even hope that the drawing is good enough that it can become something more, that it can be built into our livelihood.  This hope is also mirrored in the process of seeking an MFA, or any higher degree for that matter.  It’s a kind of religion, a belief that a better tomorrow can be handed to us.  You can’t win if you don’t play.  Scratching away the foil of a scratch card is a form of mark making in which we are in pursuit of that hope.  As we scratch the card we become unconscious of the marks that we are making.  Our hands moving over the card leaving behind a drawing, a shape made not by our eyes but our hope.  So too as we cast a seed head to the wind.  So too as a school girl might abandon her self consciousness for a moment and write a lover’s name on the window of a car, a doodle in a history notebook, a name redacted, not a winner.  The drawings have become drawings of drawings.  As I troll through bars and scratch cards with the people that I meet, the marks in the foil become tea leaves, a drawing of unbridled hope.  Like school girls, the cruel optimism holds us for an instant, then we snap back to our drinks, bound in a moment in which we dared to hope.