Melvino Garretti: Searching and Listening in My Backyard

Parker Gallery is proud to present its second solo exhibition by Melvino Garretti, Searching and Listening in My Backyard. The exhibition features new paintings, assemblage pieces, ceramic sculptures, and works on paper. The exhibition title points to Garretti’s propensity for collecting and integrating the materials of life into his artwork. Having adopted the moniker of an “urban and suburban anthropologist,” Garretti’s art practice expresses the eco-system in which the works are made along with the enduring symbology of the human experience. Garretti inherited his collecting impulse from his family, who operated an antique store in their South Central Los Angeles neighborhood while Garretti was growing up. Garretti’s newest works draw from his own trove, bringing together textiles, doll parts, furniture, beads and more into freestanding and wall-hanging paintings. Garretti uses visual archetypes to parse through cultural histories and the inherent paradoxes of the lived experience. Visual motifs with dual meanings appear across these new paintings. A snake-like figure represents both the poisonous villain in the Garden of Eden as well as the serpent on a staff of the sacred Hippocratic Oath. The largest assemblage painting in the exhibition A vision in my yard to find the crossroads, who and what’s waiting pulls together materials from the artist’s own backyard–including wooden fence posts– and depicts the stray cats that have made a sanctuary there. Feral cats can be desperately viscous, and yet, painted in Garretti’s electric style, they become part of the artist’s pulsating, lyrical universe. “My artwork is about my observation in my environment. The agony of being a human being is so profound it can cause me to get inside of a blue recycling can and start kicking and kicking and kicking to the other side of the road.”— Melvino Garretti