Donna Garcia
Donna Garcia (she/her) is lens-based artist whose work illustrates a semiotic dislocation that has been organically reconstructed in a way that gives her subjects a voice in the present moment; something they did not have in the past. Her images rise above what they actually are and become empathic recreations in a fine art narrative.
She often utilizes self-portraiture with motion and the idea of animism to provide an indication of the other in her work; a surplus threat to the perpetuity of our cultural grand narratives in defining elements like gender and race. Otherness is much more because it is grounded in being and is non-binary in nature.
Garcia’s work modulates against a fixed self and reflects a grounding in being. She creates images that аre indexical in nature not iconic - they are uncertain and indeterminate. The idea of time oscillation is throughout her work, and reads neither in one place nor another - destabilizing our perspective, and allowing us to see what we couldn’t see before.
Her use of abstraction pulls the viewer forward into a new sovereignty, and expanded possibility .
She has exhibited at The National Center for Civil and Human Rights: Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta, Griffin Museum of Photography, PhotoNOLA, Atlanta Photography Group (APG), FotoFestival, Lenzburg, Skye Gallery, Rockport Museum, Center of Photographic Arts (CA), Jadite Gallery (NYC), SITE: Brooklyn, CPAC (Denver), Cab Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Los Angeles Center of Photography, PhotoFest Houston, FotoNostrum Gallery, Barcelona, Spain, Peinture Fraiche, Brussels, Belgium, Rotterdam Photo Festival, and PH21 Contemporary, Budapest. Her work has been featured in PDN Magazine, Lenscratch, All About Photo, The Boston Globe, Art Ascent Magazine (cover), Dodho Magazine, The Cape Cod Times, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, Artist Portfolio Magazine: Tenth Anniversary Edition, Art Fluent, F-Stop Magazine, Shots Magazine (feature), SocialDocumentary.net, Grryo.com, In-the-In- Between.com, LensCulture.com Emerging Artist Feature Gallery, Editor’s Pick 2017, LensCulture.com Visual Storytelling Feature Gallery, Editor’s Pick 2018, and LensCulture.com Black and White, Feature Gallery, Editor’s Pick 2021. She is a 2019 nominee of reGENERATION 4: The Challenges of Photography and the Museum of Tomorrow. Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland. Emerging Artists to Watch, Fine Art Photography, Nomination (only 250 lens-based emerging artists nominated worldwide).
Donna Garcia has a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design.