Saved & Drowned

Nature’s Way as Means to an End

Garnet's ​cold-as-ice or white flamed, precise artworks explore humanity’s ​essential ​​themes aside and away from any superfluous ‘isms’ or seasonal cultural fads. He describes Saved & Drowned as “A small narrative of our time.” In fact, it is not a small narrative but rather a photographic epic about all time. It is a photographic work of 21 images, seven Cantos of three images.

The photographs contain pleasure and destruction, often simultaneously. The narrative is universal and personal. The movement is from elevation, from the Saved, to the depths, to the Drowned. Nature is presented as dark, as a place of destruction, eloquently, even beautifully abject.

The blackened eye, the scaly skin, the bodies overtaken by water profoundly invoke the impossibility of possibility. Here is nature’s will to death. It is clear, we do not win in this epic struggle.

Eldon Garnet is an artist and writer based in Toronto, Canada. He has exhibited his photographic and sculptural work extensively in North America and Europe. A participant at the Venice Biennale in 1985. Garnet’s work, NO was included in the exhibition Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The National Gallery of Canada hosted his mid-career survey entitled: The Fallen Body. Garnet has had major surveys of his photographs, at the Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie and Dust at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto His novels Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure and Lost Between the Edges are published by Semiotext(e). He was the editor of IMPULSE, an international magazine of art, fashion and ideas. Impulse Archaeology was exhibited at WhiteBox, NY, and MOCA, Toronto and a book published by University of Toronto Press.