Garrick Imatani is known for carefully researched work that presents nuanced studies of the intersections of race, the body, and political history. With A Broken Tower Imatani turns this process on its head, starting by writing poetry and connective fragments of thought and building a metaphorical structure for the show. The resulting exhibition is an exploration of living as a person of color within an institutional world–a visual analogy for the politics and psychology of skin color expressed in objects and images.

In A Broken Tower, Imatani references techniques associated with dying or shifting technologies, the dodge and burn from analog photographic processes, for example, as tactics for creating a language of metaphors tying the past with the present and commenting on strategies used to navigate between different worlds.

Garrick Imatani’s recent collaborative public art project The Watcher Files Project (with Kaia Sand) has been exhibited at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; Art, Design, and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara; YNKB, Copenhagen, Denmark; and Portland Archives and Records Center, Portland, OR among others. Other recent exhibitions and venues include the Southern Oregon SITE Project at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR with Physical Education (keyon gaskin, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto, Lu Yim); Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Russia; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Incident Report, Hudson, NY; and, the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, Portland, ME. Imatani is the recipient of several grants and awards including from The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Maine Arts Commission, and Regional Arts & Culture Council; as well as The Andy Warhol Foundation, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Calligram Foundation as part of the Spreading Rumours collaborative with Ariana Jacob, Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. In 2016, he received a Percent for Art commission for a permanent public installation at the University of Oregon, the G. Douglas Byers Memorial Scholarship for a Signal Fire Outpost Residency, Mt. Hood, OR, and the Ford Family Foundation Resident Artist Fellowship at Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY.

Garrick Imatani holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BA in Art Studio from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is Assistant Professor of Sculpture and 3D Fabrication at Southern Oregon University and lives and works in Portland and Ashland, Oregon.