Art historical paper dolls – attempting to get into the world through each of our individual stories… was an initial thought I had upon leaving Geoffrey Farmer’s exhibit, currently on view at the ICA Boston. By this I do not mean that the work was like a still from an art-house version of “Toy Story” made by resurrected members of Dada. Nor was it just another humorous art meme on my Instagram feed. It was neither of those things – but also very much them.
The works presented in this show are primarily made up of hundreds of small-scale sculptural photo collages that are linked to narrative texts available to read in the gallery space. Pulling from the canon of art historical and mass media imagery, Farmer’s work is at once a delirious plunge into visual overstimulation as it a relief in recognizing our influence over these images that flood our daily lives. Farmer establishes a series of phrases both visual and textual that the viewer can take from and rearrange, creating their own new histories. By disrupting “appropriate” understandings of a timeline, Farmer investigates the inevitable historical fragility of an image with both humor and kindness.
– Maggie Jensen

Photo:Jean Vong
Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York