Screens Series Online: Mariah Garnett

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Mariah Garnett
Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, 2010
16 mm film installation, sound, color; 14 min 14 sec
Courtesy the artist and ltd los angeles

“Screens Series Online: Mariah Garnett” continues the New Museum’s Screens Series, a platform inaugurated in 2016 for the presentation of video works by emerging contemporary artists. The online series will include single-channel videos by artists who have exhibited at the New Museum in the past several years. Mariah Garnett’s Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin (2010) was originally presented in the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” which was on view at the New Museum from September 27–January 21, 2018.

Combining elements of documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema, Mariah Garnett’s films often restage and reinterpret existing source material as a means of exploring the relationship between representation, embodiment, and identity. Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin (2010) revolves around Garnett’s interactions, real and imaginary, with the celebrated porn star Peter Berlin, whose erotic photographs and films—for which he served as both artist and model—made him an icon of 1970s gay masculinity. To create the installation, Garnett filmed herself reenacting several of Berlin’s signature images, adopting his outfits, pageboy haircut, and swaggering poses. She then painted over the 16mm filmstrip by hand, alternately framing and obscuring her performing body with flickering fields of bright color suggestive of animation. The work is structured around an intergenerational exchange with Berlin and his practice of self-fashioning, and the artist’s attempts to inhabit his carefully crafted persona. The project reflects Garnett’s interest in exploring alternate genealogies for queer art and representation that trouble categories of gender while paying tribute to fearless iconoclasts of past generations. —Rachel Wetzler

Mariah Garnett (b. 1980, Portland, ME) lives and works in Los Angeles. Past solo exhibitions include Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); Metropolitan Center for the Arts, Belfast, UK (2016); and a two-person exhibition with William E. Jones at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2016). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including Every Woman Biennial, Los Angeles (2019); Queer Biennial, Los Angeles (2018); “Conflicted Bodies: Feminist and Queer Responses to Militarism and Violence since 1900,” Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017); “MAC International,” Metropolitan Center for the Arts, Belfast, UK (201); “Night Transmissions: Electronic Intimacy,” National Broadcase, Iceland; and “Made In L.A. 2014,” The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2014). Garnett received an Artadia Award, Los Angeles and was a finalist for the Ulsterbank Prize at MAC International, Belfast, UK in 2016; a Harpo Emerging Artist Grant, Los Angeles, in 2017; and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video in 2019 .
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” was curated by Johanna Burton, former Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, with Sara O’Keeffe, former Assistant Curator, and Natalie Bell, former Assistant Curator.

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