J O A N N A     G A R M O N

To live in a body is an ongoing act of labor. A weight-bearing object, the body is constantly engaged with gravity; it is a grounded yet ephemeral vessel. My practice implements extreme and mundane laborious processes as a means of exploring exhaustion and accomplishment. I examine overactivity of thought, suffocation, and lived/inherited trauma, but also the simple pleasures of language and verbosity. I seek to eliminate viewers’ rational desires to read, recognize and understand so as to place them in discomfort when faced with perceived futility. Though I wish to sit comfortably in this same discomfort, I face the cognitive dissonance in my own inability to exist without answers, guaranteed results, or predictability. I create in this realm of dissonance, where my process is both repetitive, often formulaic and result-producing, while microcosmically endless and ostensibly output-lacking. The hindrance of weight, illegibility, decontextualization and repetitious processes ironically ground the work.