Denver Garza
Published August 26, 2020
Denver Garza pieces together complex structures -- assemblages, masks, painted landscapes, or figurative watercolors -- from painted, drawn, and cut fragments. Images and colorful pieces, handmade and found, are joined together or tear other forms asunder. This piecing together produces amorphous amalgams, oftentimes with flashes of a recognizable form, a diagram, a human body, a religious object.
Using symbols, personal or otherwise, Garza leaves clues, keys to understanding these structures. These structures are always complex. No doubt their complexity is driven in part by a personal visual language. But there's more to it. Garza admits that these structures are many times informed by observations and adopted frameworks or narratives about the human experience, sometimes from myth, sometimes from psychology.
From this multilayered understanding of the human persona and its experience comes that logic of the layering of pieces and fragments upon one another. Therein lies Garza's creative engine. For him, creativity is not only in the very things that we do as people living in society, but it can be an act of contending with that perceived reality.
Denver Garza is primarily known as a mixed media artist and has exhibited in and around the country. He was recently featured in Hatch Art Project and Art in the Park 2020. For more information about this artist, visit @slowtear
