Mariah Garnett

Mariah Garnett is principally a moving-image artist, but she also works with watercolours and installation. Labelling herself as an 'experimental documentary filmmaker', Garnett's pieces examine inter-generational relationships, queerness, and cultural mythologies. Garnett creatively rejects any pretence of objectivity by rooting her films in her own subjectivity. Weaving archival footage together with hazy memories and re-enactment, Garnett unravels stable formats of storytelling, with each work revelling in multiple potential truths. Often inserting herself as performer in these moving-image studies, Garnett further investigates her positionality as a queer filmmaker and that particular lineage of artmaking. Discussing the tangential, explorative quality of her methodology, Garnett explains that “I often start with one idea and then as always, it sort of fractures and spirals out from the original thing I’m interested in”. This “spiralling” that Garnett describes affords each piece with deeply personal kernels, whilst the films expand to situate this starting point within the wider context of the contemporary political and ideological landscape. Outside of moving image, Garnett's delicate and observant watercolours tenderly bring domestic scenes into being. ...

Commonwealth and Council is a gallery in Koreatown, Los Angeles founded in 2010. Our program is rooted in our commitment to explore how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. Commonwealth and Council celebrates our manifold identities and experiences through the shared dialogue of art—championing practices by women, queer, POC, and our ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities.