88 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 89
Eldon Garnet Artifacts of Memory
(installation-in-progress) 2 015
Stainless steel 10 x 5. 7 9 x 1. 5 2 m
COURTESY CITY OF TORONTO“The landscape,” he wrote, “features the blackened remains of burnt
trees, charred earth, jagged rocks—a difficult and dangerous terrain
occupied by groups of naked men, women and children, their bodies
blackened by soot and ash.”
Then he set out to build the photograph for himself. “The work is about
recovery after collapse,” says Garnet. But if it is, the recovery is turgidly,
painfully protracted. The people in these magma-slow photos—who are
sausage-coloured, rough as earthenware figures baking in hot sand (Garnet
rubbed them with baby oil and white ash) — look as if they’d fit the people-
shaped holes of ancient Pompeii. Some of them resemble Garnet’s insects.Some of them, by contrast, offer a Michelangelo-esque massiveness and
a striving muscularity.
But somebody—a woman—is beginning to eat. She gnaws at a piece
of honeycomb. Someone else—a man—is holding a seedling he will perhaps
try to plant. Perhaps recovery is slowly underway.
But recovery from what? What kind of aspiration is born from ashes?
Garden of Hell on Earth groans from Garnet’s passionate appetite for the
wages of need and its dividends of fear. Here, in his newest work—part
parable, part passion play— Garnet holds out a handful of dust. “We’re
lonely organisms,” he says. “We can’t share pain.” ■Garnet_ sp16_13TSLR.indd 89 02/01/16 10:18 AM