JOEL GARCIA

ARTIST STATEMENT

"Over the past ten years I’ve worked with natural pigments and began experimenting with natural inks for screen printing which required a lot of precision both in the printing and the color making. Screen printing bf can be very toxic and I wanted to have a creative practice that did better in honoring the land. 

I’ve continued to learn about color making derived plants and the earth and have been able to teach this practice as places such as Occidental College and Art Center as well as teach others how to facilitate learning opportunities at places like the Getty and other cultural sites. 

These paintings are a deeper dive into this form of color making and a move away from cooor making formulas that can reinforce western views, rules and expectations about pigments and natural dyes. It’s my way of reindigenizing this space of color. 

These works are a collection reflecting on the connection to water, ancestral color-making, and alchemy. It’s about energizing color, learning what it wants to do, and supporting that exchange between color, temperature, chemical reactions and the paper. 

Lastly, my creative work is intrinsically connected to my politics and values. For someone like me, an Indigenous artist and cultural worker, and survivor of violence, there’s no separation of the two and Dear Palestine is a piece that although very different in form highlights many of the same issues in the other four paintings which is the relationships and kinship between humans and the ecosystems and ecologies we are part of and the liberation of Indigenous Peoples."