Helen K. Garber takes her photo-based mixed media work to the next level with her eerie new surrealistic series, Broken Dreams...the series of her photo-based, mixed media works that were introduced at the Month of Photography Los Angeles, 2013 in curator, Liz Gordon's Spaces installation.
Using encaustic wax medium to allow multiple layers of images printed on handmade paper, book pages and framed in found building materials, she is able to illustrate two perspectives of one view. Looking inside and out simultaneously. What once seemed a grand idea, the great escape from the rat race of the big city, to run a motel, hotel or cafe in a rural area turns into a nightmare. And for an unknown reason, is quickly abandoned at a distant past moment in time. Book pages are from the artist's own paperback copy of Rod Serling's New Stories from The Twilight Zone, which she purchased and read as a child in the early 1960's.
For Photo LA 2014, Helen added a second series entitled Summer Memories, using similar materials and images plus vintage portraits that evoke a surrealistic sense of place, time, dreams and memory. Perhaps a portal to the past. These standing ruins were once the locale for fun, mischief, an escape from the heat and the doldrums of summer in the city. Although the images are of children not known to the artist, she can clearly sense that they once played in locales very similar to the ones she has found on her travels. These book pages are from the artist's own paperbacks of ghost stories, purchased as a child in Brooklyn, NY.