San Francisco Chronicle Review on Sid Garrison
2008
Serious work in colored pencil by Sid Garrison
By Kenneth Baker
Saturday, July 5, 2008
San Franciscan Sid Garrison displays impressive staying power in his fourth show of drawings at Limn Gallery.
Garrison works in colored pencil in a manner at once abstract, improvisational and subtly responsive to pressures of the wider culture.
His medium exudes a whiff of hobbyism, yet the seriousness of his work, even at its most fanciful, never flags.
Though Garrison seems never to repeat himself, his work looks like no one else's. His show's enigmatic title, "07 08 28," refers to work made in 2007 and 2008 on 28-inch-square sheets.
Consider "November 21, 2007," characteristically titled after the date of its completion. A patchwork of irregular shapes in cream, orange and deep charcoal brown, punctuated with carefully mottled passages, it grips the eye - from 5 feet away or 50 - without being seductive.
Garrison's drawings nearly always avoid obvious graces. They come full of awkward turns and jarring leaps among disparate color areas and levels of detail. Despite having all these qualities, "November 21" solves almost offhandedly the old formal problem of giving optical parity to figure and ground.
Imagery never surfaces in Garrison's work, but it lives partly by an uncalculating responsiveness to themes on the minds of everyone awake to the world: the graphics of political geography, the anxious-making imagery of microbiology, the ubiquity of camouflage.
If his work made us feel that he contrived these connections, it would not have the power that it does. It materializes something we experience privately and inarticulately: the intrusion into consciousness, unbidden, of collective preoccupations.
Sid Garrison: 07 08 28: Drawings. Through July 19. Limn Gallery, 292 Townsend St., San Francisco. (415) 977-1300, www.limnartgallery.com.
Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
By Kenneth Baker
Saturday, July 5, 2008
San Franciscan Sid Garrison displays impressive staying power in his fourth show of drawings at Limn Gallery.
Garrison works in colored pencil in a manner at once abstract, improvisational and subtly responsive to pressures of the wider culture.
His medium exudes a whiff of hobbyism, yet the seriousness of his work, even at its most fanciful, never flags.
Though Garrison seems never to repeat himself, his work looks like no one else's. His show's enigmatic title, "07 08 28," refers to work made in 2007 and 2008 on 28-inch-square sheets.
Consider "November 21, 2007," characteristically titled after the date of its completion. A patchwork of irregular shapes in cream, orange and deep charcoal brown, punctuated with carefully mottled passages, it grips the eye - from 5 feet away or 50 - without being seductive.
Garrison's drawings nearly always avoid obvious graces. They come full of awkward turns and jarring leaps among disparate color areas and levels of detail. Despite having all these qualities, "November 21" solves almost offhandedly the old formal problem of giving optical parity to figure and ground.
Imagery never surfaces in Garrison's work, but it lives partly by an uncalculating responsiveness to themes on the minds of everyone awake to the world: the graphics of political geography, the anxious-making imagery of microbiology, the ubiquity of camouflage.
If his work made us feel that he contrived these connections, it would not have the power that it does. It materializes something we experience privately and inarticulately: the intrusion into consciousness, unbidden, of collective preoccupations.
Sid Garrison: 07 08 28: Drawings. Through July 19. Limn Gallery, 292 Townsend St., San Francisco. (415) 977-1300, www.limnartgallery.com.
Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
