Artist Statement

"It is all too easy to take language, one's own language, for granted—one may need to encounter another language, or rather another mode of language, in order to be astonished, pushed into wonder, again."

—Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989

My work investigates perception and how meaning is deciphered. I have consistently—and persistently—focused on finding ways to visually express both the beauty and vagaries of communication. Profoundly hard of hearing since infancy and acutely aware of the potential for misinterpretation, I explore the spaces between silence and sound: confusion and clarity, chaos and precision.

Interested in gaps between our five (known) senses and how they inform, influence and intercept one another, I aim to find visual equivalents that suggest the complicated processes in how we receive and make sense of information. I create structures and images that evoke, for instance, cochlea, ear drums, instruments, neural networks and language systems.

Printmaking processes meld my concepts with my medium. I combine traditional techniques—etching, woodcut, relief, and dry point—with contemporary processes, materials, and iconography. As in a musical composition, I introduce, repeat and vary marks and symbols weaving them in different patterns and rhythms. Scoring, scribing and burning copper are equivalences to the high fevers that destroyed my ears' nerve cells. Player piano scrolls in which the holes (the absence of the paper) represent the presence of sound are a near perfect material metaphor.

My explorations in varied media in two and three-dimensions as well as sound evoke a sense of order as well as orderly growth gone awry. I believe that the aberrant, the rogue and the wayward signals are the ones that can guide us to expand our understanding of our worlds and ourselves.

Artist Bio

Randy Garber's studio practice is divided between her studio in Somerville, MA and the Mixit Print Studio, also in Somerville, MA where she is a Partner.

A recipient of many artist awards and grants including ones from the Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Wynn Newhouse Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation, The Somerville Arts Council. Her work can be found in museum, corporate and private collections including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Decordova Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, permanent commissions for the Children's Hospital Karp Cancer Research Building in Boston, and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Portland ME. Recent solo exhibitions of Garber's work include the Lunder Gallery at Lesley College, Cambridge, MA and the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College in Boston, MA.

She works eclectically, with a passion for using traditional printmaking and painting techniques to express her intensively researched contemporary concerns and concepts. Garber's recent work is installation based. Using player piano scrolls and their boxes as well as the copper plates from which she makes her matrices, and sometimes sound, Randy presents work that expresses what she describes as the "space between silence and sound."

Randy Garber currently teaches drawing, printmaking and professional practices at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.