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INTRO

Michael Garlington (born March 3, 1977) is an American artist. His media involves large format 4x5 black and white photography, costume and set design, assemblage, hand-casted sculpture, and photographic mixed media installation. Garlington is the son of a journalist and a photographer, and was raised in Petaluma, California where he currently resides. Surrounded by hippies, poultry and dairy farmers, metal fabricators, bleeding hearts, artists and transients, Garlington drew his early inspiration. He began working in a black and white photography lab in 1994. In 1998, he began designing and shooting dark, fantastical black and white portraiture.

His first on-going art project, entitled “PHOTOCAR,” rolled into the world and across the country with other artists, writers and musicians in tow for the first time in the year 2000. Since then, Garlington has driven across the US and Europe in regular PHOTOCAR tours, he has been a featured artist in solo and group shows domestic and abroad, including PhotoNY, PhotoLA and PhotoSF, and he has created several mixed media art installations sponsored by private collectors and organizations such as the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Burning Man Arts Festival.

In 2009, Garlington’s work was the target of an art heist from the Kimball Jenkins Estate in New Hampshire. http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/thieves-nab-photos-from-new-exhibit

EARLY LIFE

Michael Garlington was born to Cissy Spindler, a landscape photographer and master printer,, and Phillip Garlington, a journalist at the time for the SF Examiner during the time that the actions of the Zodiak killer gripped Northern California and the nation. As a child, Garlington lived with his father in Petaluma, California rambling around Old Town, growing up amongst Petaluma’s eclectic population of local artists, builders, and agrarians.

EARLY CAREER

In 1994, Michael Garlington dropped out of high school and began working at the Fox Theater, a downtown music venue known at that time for its punk rock shows and gritty crowds. Concerned for her son’s future, Cissy Spindler urged Garlington to work for her and her husband David at their San Francisco-based black and white photographic lab, Spindler Photographic. There, they processed and printed work for the Bay Area’s finest black and white film photographers.

At Spindler Photographic, Garlington gained and mastered his skills of black and white film developing and printing. The clientele at Spindler represented the best photographers in the Bay Area and this exposure helped inform both his composition as well as dark room talents. He became a master printer during this time.

In 1998, Garlington began photographing and documenting the world around him as well as creating new worlds by building backdrop and set elements and installations into portraits he refers to as photosculptures. His eye captured luminous yet stark imagery. His portraiture included fairy-tale like scenes encompassing the spectrum of human experience, from the mundane to the poignant to the absurd.

In 2000, Garlington began the PHOTOCAR project, where he and artistic peers of various media backgrounds set forth on a cross-country trip in a vehicle covered in decoupage of his photography. Each artist was encouraged to create and intereract with those they met along the way as well as collaborate with one another. Garlington’is early PHOTOCAR projects included filmmaker Peter Bassist; Mariah Bassist, writer; Ryan Beebe, composer/musician; Damian Kalish, actor/screenwriter; Melina Giorgi, photographer; Eric Meltesen, conceptual artist; Adam Beebe, painter; Lauren Fryer, writer and photographer; and Aaron Kirby, filmmaker.

PHOTOCAR tours have led Garlington and his cohorts across the country to a desert survivalist colony, through Texas to visit guitarist Daniel Johnston as well as beekeepers and alligator wrestlers; through the cemeteries of New Orleans; to Death Valley; and to be featured at the art events PhotoLA (2004) and PhotoNY (2005).

In 2005, a collection of Garlington’s portraiture was published under the title, Portraits of the Belly of the Whale. He has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and in 2009 his work was the target of an art heist in Connecticut. Coincidentally, Garlington, en route to the art opening that night, was unable to reach New Hampshire for the event due to flight delays as the result of bad weather. His statements to local newpapers were taken over the phone while he was stranded in Dallas, TX.

In 2009, Garlington began working for conceptual artist Laura Kimpton. Her concepts that year centered around birds. During his time working for Kimpton, Garlington built costumes and sets around Kimpton’s avian theme, and photographed Kimpton in these costumes amassing a body of work that included custom, assemblage-framed black and white portraiture; hand-casted, art assemblage; and sculpture. The whole collection opened in San Francisco’s acclaimed 49 Geary Street building as Kimpton’s first solo exhibition entitled “Flying Solo.”

Also in 2010, Garlington was sponsored to create his work “PHOTOHOUSE” by the National Endowment of the Arts and the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Foundation at SF Camerawork. Coincidentally, both Garlington’s “PHOTOHOUSE” and Kimpton’s “Flying Solo” exhibits opened on June 2, 2011 in downtown San Francisco, California.

Burning Man Arts Festival chose and sponsored Garlington’s work as part of their Honorarium Collection at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada two years in a row, first in 2012 with EGO, co-created with Laura Kimpton. EGO was a 20’ x 60’ x 4’ installation piece intricately blanketed with assemblage of thousands of hand-poured gilded relics. During Garlington’s 6 months of work on EGO, usually 60 - 80 hours a week, the artist slipped into a temporary spiral of madness, which led him to sobriety by June of 2012. The blaze of EGO when it burned on the Saturday night at midnight at the Burning Man Arts Festival seemed an apt ending to the intense period of the artist’s life.

In 2013, Garlington designed and built PHOTOCHAPEL. PHOTOCHAPEL was a 8’x20’ Gothic-style chapel which included flying buttresses and multiple golden pinnacles that culminated in a 40’ tall golden steeple. Inside and out, the PHOTOCHAPEL was covered with Garlington’s black and white portraiture contrasting the gold accents, replete with a gilded interior; an alter; a confessional; a tribute to a fallen co-member of Burning Man’s DPW, Joey Jello, whose portrait and personal motto was memorialized on the interior back wall, “Never Betray;” and  catacombs defined by a wall of golden skulls. PHOTOCHAPEL was chosen as one of the featured art projects for the 3-D IMAX movie currently in production entitled “The Art of Burning.”