Mariah Garnett: Dreamed This Gateway

June 10 - August 28,2022

From Contemporary Arts Museum Houston: "Who speaks and who is silenced? What histories or facets of a culture do we privilege and why? How do we acknowledge our history while also rewriting, repairing, and moving beyond our past trauma? Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett (b. 1980) asks these questions and others in the first U.S. solo museum presentation of her work, Mariah Garnett: Dreamed This Gateway. On view in CAMH’s Nina and Michael Zilkha Gallery from June 10–August 28, 2022, the exhibition will feature new and recent operatic videos, including a multi-channel installation commissioned by CAMH. Mariah Garnett, Dreamed This Gateway, 2022 (video stills). 5-channel video installation, 16mm film transferred to 4K video: color, sound, 25:13 minutes. Commissioned by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Working in collaboration with experimental vocalist Holland Andrews, Cairo-based documentary playwright Raphaël Khouri, and professional opera singers Christopher Paul Craig and Breanna Sinclairé, Garnett has created a new body of work inspired by an archive of materials related to the enigmatic and remarkable life and artistic output of her great-great-aunt, Ruth Lynda Deyo (1884–1960). A spiritualist, synesthete, and composer, Deyo moved to Cairo, Egypt in 1924, where she began to have visions transmitted by spirits. Deyo meticulously transcribed her visions and communications—as well as her political, social, and financial anxieties—in a series of diaries, eventually composing an opera based on the lives of Egyptian pharaohs Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. Mariah Garnett, installation view of A Heart of Opal Fire at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo by Ruben Diaz. The documents in this archive—as well as conversations between Garnett and her Cairo-based collaborators—provide a point of departure for a new body of work, exploring unexpected and poignant connections between spirituality, trauma, and art making through the artist’s queer lens. Reckoning with her family’s complicity in extractive systems of colonial oppression and cultural appropriation, specifically Deyo’s fetishization of Ancient Egyptian culture, Garnett and her collaborators weave together a rich and fantastical vision of individual and collective trauma and transcendence within the context of our contemporary political and ideological landscape. Mariah Garnett: Dreamed This Gateway is organized by Rebecca Matalon, Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Support Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance."

On View: June 10, 2022 | 12-5 pm

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston - CAMH 5216 Montrose Boulevard
Houston, TX 77006
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