Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce Gabrielle Garland’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too, on view 4 September - 25 October at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Tara Anne Dalbow.
While Gabrielle Garland’s paintings do not depict any figures, they maintain an air of portraiture. Here, the subjects are not people, but the homes they inhabit, which act as surrogates of their personality and private lives. Garland’s impressionistic style does not seek an exacting architectural record. Instead, she treats each home with patient reverence, revealing subtle facets easily overlooked in the haste of the everyday passerby. Stairs, flower boxes, or mailboxes swell or shrink disproportionately, revealing the distortions of the artist’s memory (that murky area where structural logic intermingles with emotional noise).
At times, her homes take on an almost human quality: illuminated windows glow like eyes on either side of a doorway, overhanging porticos jut out like a nose, and the eaves of roofs contort into a furrowed brow or expression of delight. Warping and sagging beneath their own weight, some lean toward each other as if in whispered, huddled conversation. By humanizing the inanimate, Garland’s work invites us to slow down and consider our built environment, not as a passive background, but as an active witness, which acts as an impression of our daily lives.
Tara Anne Dalbow notes that, “although human figures are absent from her compositions, their presence is palpable. These houses aren’t abandoned; they don’t exist in a post-human apocalypse. Instead, they are the products of people’s labor, care, and creativity. That each house, despite the repetition of architectural elements and the use of familiar mass-produced materials, is distinctive, is a testament to both the ingenuity of their owners and the quality of the artist’s attention: her ability to discern the most illustrative details. It’s true that no two are alike, as Dorothy said: there’s no place like home.”
