GOLLY! 2020

GOLLY!
SRISA, Florence
11 February - 14 March 2020

GOLLY! was an exhibition at the SRISA Project Space in Florence, dedicated to Gary Jo Gardenhire’s reflection on the ways in which the personal can construct profound narratives about collectivity and the collective can provide flattened or fragile notions of individuality. 

The works featured were a mash up of the artist’s abstract paintings and his pattern based works dedicated to the minstrel like Golliwogs; the former, a meditation on the artist’s Midwest upbringing, of quilting and of distant geographies and, the latter, a grappling with a form of ownership and active detachment of stereotypes from their human implications.

Gardenhire’s Golliwogs series is a body of works on paper that parade minstrelsy through the inhuman caricature of black face. Decoratively playful and colorfully exciting these works are expressly 2-dimensional patterns that do not permit the viewer to imagine beyond the surface of the paper. This intentional flattening of the trope is engaged in the work of subversion and reclaiming of that which was created to demonize and ridicule into enticing and rousing images simultaneously disturbing and telling.

The new fragment of this series, painted on reclaimed antique prints, ignite the historical implications in the construction of the Golliwog caricature and the capacity of this parody to trump nuance. 

The gathering of these works as a collective composition sat within the exhibition in contrast to the conscious spatiality of the Great Plains series, inviting the viewer to fill in the distance between these seemingly disparate works whose collision of identity and abstraction disrupt the conservative investment in figuration through a formal embodiment of thought. 

Download the full exhibition guide (English & Italian).

The exhibition was part of the V° Edition of Black History Month Florence.