Join Photographers Jacques Garnier and Clayton Spada, founding members of The Legacy Project Collaboartive, for a gallery walkthrough and discussion of The Great Picture: The World’s Largest Photograph.
FREE Admission
Join Photographers Jacques Garnier and Clayton Spada, founding members of The Legacy Project Collaboartive, for a gallery walkthrough and discussion of The Great Picture: The World’s Largest Photograph.
The Legacy Project is a long-term artists' collective comprised of Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada. In 2002, the six artists were granted extraordinary access to the closed Marine Corp Air Station El Toro in Southern California. Since then, they have shaped a project of rare scope and significance. To date, the collective has made more than 150,000 images at the 4,700-acre former military base, an art-historical document on a scale seldom seen. In addition to personal work and large-scale documentation, The Legacy Project has created a number of special projects, including The Great Picture. Work from the project has been shown in more than 35 exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad.
Jacques Garnier is a photographic artist based in Southern California. He is an honor’s graduate from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a Master’s Degree in French Literature. Garnier’s photographs reside in museums, academic institutions and galleries throughout the United States and Europe.
Garnier grew up in West Los Angeles where his European parent’s values and traditions were juxtaposed against an inner city mentality. It is here that Garnier learned about the poetry of contrast and disillusionment. Artist, lecturer as well as photographer, Garnier’s formal and poetic images of abandoned spaces, both psychological and environmental, are an outgrowth of his personal search for the uncommon and unexpected.
Garnier’s major bodies of work share many common elements. Sparse and often formal, these color photographs explore the limits of psychological chaos seen through the residues of human existence. Mostly devoid of people, they portray a world whose architect is poverty and whose building materials have been deemed irrelevant. While all of Garnier’s projects have a documentary flair, the major bodies of work often focus on the frayed edges of society. These projects are often reminders of broken dreams and promises.
Most recently, Garnier is involved with many documentary projects. As a founding member of The Legacy Project, Garnier has made a 15- year commitment to archive the dismantling and urban renewal of one of the largest shuttered military base in the United States. In 2006, Garnier was one of these six artists who spent nine months transforming an abandoned F-18 hanger into the world’s largest camera in order to create the world’s largest photograph. Commentators and critics view the resulting 32-foot by 111-foot traditional silver gelatin image as a huge transitional statement marking the end of 167 years of film-based photography and the commencement of digital dominance. This endeavor has already produced two books with a third due in the fall of 2009. Garnier has also worked with the LA Conservancy helping to photographically preserve the architectural history of Los Angeles. Recently back from Armenia, Garnier documented the Armenia Eye Care Project, a group of devoted vision specialists who have been donating their time and resources to improving eye care in this part of the world.
Artist, curator, writer and adjunct faculty member, Cypress College Photography Department; former Director of Exhibitions and Executive Director of the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. Works have been exhibited in Britain, Canada, Europe, the People’s Republic of China and the United States, and widely published in photography annuals, periodicals and textbooks; works held in several institutional collections, including the Doheny Memorial Libraries, University of Southern California, the Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, the Digital Media Studio, University of California, Riverside/California Museum of Photography (UCR/CMP), and Huan Tie Times Art Museum, Beijing, PR China