Evans Pond, Boathouse Side, Feb. 2008

BIO

March, 2008

Deborah Garwood is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Ms. Garwood has exhibited sculpture, photography, video, installation, drawing, intaglio prints, and artist's books in New York and abroad.

As a photographer, Ms. Garwood's conceptual approach was initially influenced by Minimalist-era sculptors' use of photography. In 1991, she studied the eclectic photographs of Rodin's sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris. Ms. Garwood draws inspiration from French landscape photographs by Atget and Cuvelier, as well.

In 1997 Ms. Garwood initiated a project titled Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place. This project combines the artist's abiding fascination with the natural world with her background in sculpture and photography. Evans Pond is located about 80 miles south of New York, near the adjacent suburban towns of Haddonfield and Cherry Hill. In recent years, the Evans Pond site was recognized by the New Jersey National Register of Historic Places for its role in the Underground Railroad during the 19th century. Several generations of Quaker farmers owned the property and operated mills on the site during that era.

Ms. Garwood's multi-part, sequential imagery of Evans Pond depicts scenery in parallel perspective. It is as though the viewer were walking along a path, yet intervals between the frames interrupt the persistence of vision. This approach experiments with rhythm within the field of vision. Still photography becomes a form of slow horizontal cinema.

Ms. Garwood has made a point of using a variety of cameras and films throughout her Evans Pond project. As an archive, her project presents a study of changing photographic tastes and technologies, from early 20th-century box cameras to digital imagery. The project takes a dream-like approach to landscape as personal biography, inspired by the writings of Helene Cixous along the way.

Observation of seasonal change at Evans Pond prompted Ms. Garwood's interest in astronomy. Astronomy's larger role as an influence on the art, culture, and technology of human civilizations then became an interest to her in itself.

Ms. Garwood has participated in a number of international conferences on astronomy and the humanities. Her essay on astronomical themes in Marcel Proust's great work, In Search of Lost Time, was published by an Italian astronomical journal in 2006. Publication of her essay on astronomy and existentialism in the fiction of Albert Camus is pending, delivered at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago in 2005, is pending. Ms. Garwood's photographic essay titled Paris Solstice, inspired by Proust and French astronomical history, was presented at Oxford University in 2003, and published by Canopus Press in 2004. An image from Paris Solstice was published in Camera Austria (no. 81, 2003).

Ms. Garwood writes on the fine and performing arts. She has contributed essays and criticism to several journals, including PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press), to which she recently became a contributing editor; The New York Sun; Art Journal; and Sculpture Magazine. Her criticism has appeared on various websites, notably artcritical.com, to which she is a contributing editor.

Born in Camden, NJ, Ms. Garwood earned a BA at Oberlin College and an MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York. She also studied visual art and weaving at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, NS, and was the recipient of the Robert Smithson Memorial Scholarship for Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2004 Ms. Garwood earned a certificate in astronomy from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and has pursued independent research at the Paris Observatory. From 2006-2007, Ms. Garwood taught the history of photography at Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches, curates, and contributes to curriculum development in the Media Arts Department.

Ms. Garwood is also employed by Master Drawings Association, Inc., and serves on the Editorial Board of its quarterly journal, Master Drawings.