
The Psychic is You
2021
"The Psychic is You" invites the viewer into a layered act of looking, where the personal and the historical fold into one another across the surface of handmade Arches paper. Rendered in watercolor, the composition arranges the diaries of Ruth Lyda Deyo alongside texts on spirituality, astrology, and self-help, functioning simultaneously as a studio still life and a document of research in progress. Deyo, Mariah Garnett's great-great-aunt, was a spiritualist, synesthete, and composer who relocated to Cairo in 1924 and began transcribing visions she believed were transmitted by spirits. Those communications, bound up with her political and social anxieties, eventually gave shape to an opera she composed based on the lives of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. Garnett's watercolor captures the physical presence of these materials with an attentiveness that honors both their fragility and their strangeness. The work sits at the threshold of a larger body of research that Garnett has translated into operatic video installations and sound works, all centered on the unexpected convergences between spirituality, trauma, and artistic making. This painting belongs to the same constellation of concerns that animates her upcoming solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, her first US solo museum presentation. That context gives the work an additional charge: it is not only a finished object but a kind of evidence, a record of how one artist enters the imaginative life of another across generations. The warm enclosure of the natural maple frame completes the work's quiet material coherence, grounding an otherwise open-ended inquiry in something tactile and present. Garnett, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Film and Video who teaches at UCLA, has exhibited widely at institutions including the New Museum, SFMoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hammer Museum, among others. Her film collaboration with Dynasty Handbag, "Weirdo Night," appeared in the Sundance Film Festival New Frontiers program in 2021. Acquiring "The Psychic is You" represents an opportunity to hold a meaningful point of entry into a practice that is gathering significant institutional momentum, and to own a work that functions as both intimate object and serious art historical proposition.
- Medium
- Watercolor on arches paper, natural maple frame
- Overall
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