Savannah artist's "Ink Collages" plants whimsy among darker themes

In 2023, Tamara Garvey was given the title of Best Visual Artist by local publication Connect Savannah, beating out the other three big name creatives on the ballot, José Ray, Tittybats, and Juliana Lupacchino. And yet, I feel like Garvey remains somewhat under the radar, one of the Hostess City of the South’s few full-time working artists, but someone who rarely gets mentioned as a top creator by the region’s aesthetes.

Her latest exhibition "Ink Collages," on view at Hop Atomica through the end of May, isn’t likely to change that perception. But for those of us who have come to love the artist’s work, it’s further evidence that Garvey’s title was deserved.

“There’s that tradition of responding to really hard, terrible dangers of the outside world, with these really goofy, crazy things,” Garvey said of her work, relating it to the way the Dadaists used absurdism to respond to World War I. “It’s not just bright colors and little fun things talking to each other, with little hearts and kisses and stuff.”

And there’s the trick with Garvey’s work, a feature that perhaps plays a role in her being often overlooked: It’s cute. Pieces like “The Hamster,” “The Long Neck Monster,” and “One Chomp” all refer to creatures hidden within the works, little beings that on the surface are little more than silly color blobs, colorful and fun, but certainly not appearing to express any deep ideas.

Except that they are.

'A little bit of light-heartedness and silliness with...a little loneliness underneath'

“A lot of times there are little melancholy things…that will be buried into this colorful, joyous-looking painting,” she explained. “I think there’s a line that runs through all of my [work] that is a little bit like, the world can be very hard and dark, and hard on us. And these are a little bit like the tears of a clown. Just being a little goofy, and trying to have a little bit of light-heartedness and silliness, with the understanding that there’s a little sadness or a little loneliness underneath.”

Garvey is proficient in several mediums, but in terms of her fine art work, she’s perhaps best known for her pen and ink works on paper. Although the artist's imagery and style is contemporary, she works in a very classical style, using literal quill and ink to create her pieces. Her paintings and drawings almost always feature natural elements of some sort, a carryover from her time spent studying biology before transitioning to a career in the arts.

Ink Collages expands on Garvey’s personal artistic traditions, taking previously-created small works and trimming, cutting, and repurposing the imagery, before combining them with newly created components and backgrounds to construct unified wholes. Unification doesn’t mean linear, however, and in many of the pieces Garvey is deliberately juxtaposing disparate parts to make a statement.

“One thing I like to play with is, within the same composition, the different realms of the world; the land, the sea, and the space,” she said of her approach to the show. “So in some of them there’s a mashup where it’s like the background might look like a whimsical world, and then there’s gonna be elements pasted on that are either underwater, or they’re up in the sky.”

“It’s kind of playing with the whole natural world being tied together, and everything impacting each other,” Garvey went on to say, “and the oddness of having flowers floating around on something that’s maybe the ocean, the absurdity of that.”

Intermingled amongst the eleven new collages are three pieces from her Burglar series, each of which depicts old-time-y black-masked burglars in black and white striped shirts, climbing through the trees. They interact vaguely with objects made absurd by their placement, things like hamburgers, wine glasses, and books, and thanks to the ambiguity of the trees against the backgrounds, the rogues can appear either man-sized or miniature, with that choice being left up to the viewer.

And then there’s “Being a Doughnut.”

“I might have been in a sad mood,” Garvey considered, as she thought back to what motivated her to draw the delicious-looking red velvet breakfast pastry. “I was looking at this doughnut, and was just like, ‘Imagine if you were universally beloved.’”

The confectionary drawing, which the artist cut out and added to a vibrant psychedelic  background that Garvey described as invoking “Mellow Mushroom vibes,” includes the text “Imagine if you were a doughnut…everyone would love you so much. :).” Like much of her work, it’s cute and funny, but with a wistful touch, one related to a concept that Garvey said has turned up in her art over and over again over the past several years.

“A common thing that I think about a lot is this strong beat running through society of pairing up with somebody, and that your life is not actually complete until you find that person, and that people who find the right person are having an easier time,” she opined. “They have a partner, somebody else to help them with everything, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have that.”

Garvey is likable, friendly, and she smiles a lot, and her work is full of quirky characters and fun colors. But for both the artist and her art, that’s only the beginning of the story. Once you spend some time learning more about 2023’s Best Visual Artist and the creations she makes, it’s easy to see why she was afforded such an honor, and why it’s time we start speaking her name alongside other, more high profile Savannah artists.

“I started doing [these collages] alone; I didn’t show it to a lot of people, so I don’t really know what people will think” she said. “But I really like them.”

"Ink Collages" is on view through May 31. Hop Atomica, 535 E. 39 St., is open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday. Find Tamara Garvey on instagram @tamgarv.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah artist's 'Ink Collages' plants whimsy among darker undercurrents