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. No doubt their complexity is driven in part by a personal visual language. But there's more to it. Coming from a background in Clinical Psychology, Garza admits that these structures are many times informed by adopted frameworks or narratives about identity and the human experience from far afield as myths to Carl Jung.
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, including yearly highly anticipated art festivals like Art in the Park. Garza also publishes his own zines, collections of his drawings, paintings, photos, and poetry.
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