Aaron Garber-Maikovska: Killing the Blues

Life—so lifelike. Art—so artful.

When we look at contemporary art, the overriding question is often content. What—or even WTF—am I looking at?  That would certainly be a reasonable question when contemplating the splotchy, scrawly, washy, gouachy abstractions of the Los Angeles painter Aaron Garber-Maikovska.

But according to the artist’s idiosyncratic practice, the question is not what each work represents, but where. Literally. If you ask him to encapsulate what a work represents, he is more likely to answer with GPS coordinates than any more concrete answer.  Again, literally. The only context he offered for “Sometimes,” a piece in his new show of paintings at The Journal Gallery, was “33.826950, -117.513976”—which turns out to correspond to the parking lot of a sprawling outdoor mega mall in Corona, California, about 40 miles southwest of Downtown L.A.

And that’s all you’re getting. Because Garber-Maikovska is as much an explorer as an artist, and he lives to document his perambulations in painterly form. He’s not channeling the intangible ether or the knotty unconscious. An inveterate nomad, the artist goes on journeys (or errands) all over Southern California. Once there, he enacts little private performances, a series of moves and gestures that he encodes into his memory. That includes all kinds of somatic and spatial information of whatever SoCal sprawlscape he has planted himself in, as well as how his body and its movements relate to it. It’s plein air meets performance, with smog.

He’s making records—and when he comes back to his recording studio to mix his memories, the compositions encompass an orchestra of visual encodings. Trail maps and highway cloverleafs. Shopping lists and passing thoughts. Roadside calligraphy and scenic choreography. Clouds. Smells. Graffiti. Vibes. Two thumbs up and one middle finger. Times of day and slants of light. All the things we don’t even realize we’re tracking, mapping and clocking  in the present—and usually leave in the past.

Not that any of the results are what a recording engineer would call hi-fi. These are supersaturated modern memories, not 1970s Memorex. Garber-Maikovska is far likelier to render a trip to San Bernardino as something more suggestive of long-lost Sumerian hieroglyphics than a current billboard.

If it all sounds rather far-fetched, that’s partly the point—to make the actual, ordinary machinations of life pictorial and memorable by translating them into the vast, multi-millennial vocabulary of human gesture, bringing the mundane present into the great eternal. And it’s a testament to his work that the connections he draws seem so tenuous—because we’re the ones who stretch that distance so far. Ultimately, Garber-Maikovska’s work is a refreshing reminder that life and art are far simpler to link than we think, and far more deserving of such a hyperlink.  

David Colman