“Josh Garber’s studio at the Cornelia Arts Building,
just off the Chicago brown line, was awash in the early evening sun. It was a hot day and two huge fans were going full blast to move the air around the studio, heightening the smell of steel bar, brass, organic materials and brick walls.
I’d been to his studio before, but four years had passed already. In a rare, two-hour discussion, he brought me into his world and we traversed through his first creative formations to the present. As we voiced energetic and artistic ideas, I couldn’t help but see repeating patterns and driving forces in each phase of his work.”
Josh Garber:
Duality and Completion
~ by Jill McLean
A studio visit and an editorial biography about a well-known, serious veteran Chicago sculptor.
CLIENT
Éclat International Art Magazine
SCOPE
In-Person Interview
Editorial Biography
“One of Josh’s most spectacular
pieces is a new sculpture exhibiting in EXPO CHICAGO 2016 with Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, titled Beholden. The duality is supercharged in this one, as the heavier steel encases and caresses the softer, luminescent brass. Just as soulmates complement one another, they are also most complete together — one protecting, the other beatifying. The steel on the outside encases the gentle preciousness of the brass. Like a beautiful gem in a setting. And its height illuminates the very nature of this divine interaction, reflecting our hope for connection in perpetuity.”
“Josh’s early years
were spent between Canada (his birthplace) and the U.S. In high school, he found the rigors of sports as a way to apply his teenage angst and football was his weapon of choice. It aligned something greater in him: the idea of manipulation and touch. A whole world of art opened up before him, where he found that he could direct, touch and manipulate the medium of clay, pursuing coil pottery.”
“Garber is a fascination to witness.
Every phase connects to the next, and each time the level of depth increases, but is always added to what emerged previously. A perfect equation for the sculptor ... carving deeper, wider, higher in telling the world about his internal and public relationships with his process, materials and identity.”
“While attending Alfred University,
his first tipping point was making steel yield like fabric, bringing a rigid material into something warm and sensual. Lattice style structures emerged without the binding nature of the coil pottery, instead breaking apart the mark-making. Transmuting the physical qualities through energy, never-ending, continually regenerating, always providing, removing density, making it pliable. In other words, transforming steel into fabric.”