Garrett Pruter

Hysterical Melancholy

I work within the living archive of images that we collectively create and discard, accumulating media from eBay, YouTube, and flea markets to gather an entourage of pictures that shift, mutate, and deteriorate through touch and time. In recent work, I’ve taken imagery from soap operas and erotic thrillers, repositioning my practice within their melodramatic narratives and absurd conflicts with modernism and bureaucracy. 

Driven by strategies of reenactment and repetition, my work examines the image on a forensic level, lifting its skin to reveal a festering wound. Once open, its contents ooze out of its abrasions, beyond the edges of the photographic frame, into painting, sculpture, video, and then back into itself. Though its wound may scab into a solid surface, the image is always at risk of rupture.  

Silver grains, scratches, smudges, and pixels—a constellation of mnemonic traces is embedded in the photographic image. Through a practice of painting, photography, video, sound, and sculpture, I exhume these traces of consciousness and desire lying dormant beneath the image’s glossy surface.

By way of material excavation, I investigate the expectations we place on images in an age of seemingly infinite media production. I ask: what impulse accounts for our desire to enliven that which is dead? And: how can archival systems be reconfigured to better document the anxieties of the present moment? 

Garrett Pruter, 2020