Two Artists On Finding Recognizable Things in Unrecognizable Spaces

Gaby Collins-Fernandez’s new painting exhibition, Very High Baroque is currently on view at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami. Jarrett Earnest’s book of photographs and writing, Valid Until Sunset will be published in November by MATTE Editions. They have been friends for over a decade, and met to discuss the intersections of their new work.

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Jarrett Earnest: The thing that surprised me after finishing my book Valid Until Sunset was how it became about the way that the images displace each other. We share this very high level of belief and commitment to form, which is also a kind of interrogation of what the image is. I feel that strongly in your work, but in these new paintings in particular, because of the way that you're using family images and images of yourself, distorting them and occluding them. After putting the book together, I really wanted to think about it in the context of your project.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: You know, I think, on some level, I still don't really know what an image is. There are times that I will casually refer to the photographic stuff in the work as “image” just because I feel like that's the vernacular usage. But actually, that's not the case. The image is mysterious because it's concrete and also untraceable. It has to live in the mind, which means that it's always displaced from the painting itself. The image is like the votive version of the painting that we can carry around inside ourselves.

The more I leaned into not knowing what an image is and treating studio work as a way of trying to figure out what’s the difference between a print and a painting and an image, as basic as those questions sound, the more room I found in the work. The inclusion of personal elements is like internal Velcro to meaning. It is the thing that allows for the surface tension to keep everything in place and not feel random. Using painting to disclose something about who I was when I was 20, or who my grandmother was outside of my relationship with her, or who I was when I sent a sexy picture to someone is not so interesting when it participates in the fantasy that images can produce a concept of truth about subject(s). But placeholders, icons, shared image language—those are really interesting to me. Personal imagery lets me play with slipperiness in meaning and surface, like the foreignness that can occur when you look at a previous version of yourself or recognize yourself in someone else’s face.