Debra Girard

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Long Beach, CA, and moved to Arizona when I was 11.   I never really quite shook off California-especially Long Beach and Lakewood, where I lived.  As a child I remember  taking frequent trips to the Nu Pike, (an old amusement park in Long Beach) and having to go through the "seedy" side of Long beach: the tattoo parlors, the dark bars with 'Exotica' murals of nudes and jungle cats never quite left me.  Their rich and vivid colors seem to live on in my latest work.

I frequently exhibited in Phoenix and Tempe AZ.   Not too soon after I recieved my M.F.A. in painting at Arizona State University, I decided to move to Prague, The Czech Republic, where I became a founding member of a semi- expatriate group called "Et Cetera".   While I was living there I discovered the works of  Czech collagist Jiri Kolar, and  Czech assemblage/conceptual artist Frantisek Skala (it was Skala who admired some of my collages and suggested that I should continue with that medium).  

When I was a painter, my work dealt with the subconscious, mixed with invented archetypes, and I painted with a rough expressionism.  My collages were inspired by Prague's sooty Baroque buildings and I also included images of  Mexican milagros from my American Southwestern background.  I entitled them "Prague Milagros".

My current  digital  work is primarily about mystery,  the subconscious, plus a hefty dash of the absurd.  I want to draw people into my collage/montages and make discoveries.  A man with a gun transposed over kitschy cartoon images of children at play.  A dissected corpse layered over a television test pattern.  Layers have always fascinated me, and I rely on layering images that have a jarring effect, a visual dissonance.  Many of my pieces use digital errors I photograph from my crt television set, when it goes out of whack, which not only adds an immediacy and roughness to some of the images, but on one level becomes a statement about the media itself. In many of my pieces the medium becomes the message  (subconsciously inspired by Mr. Marshall McLuhan).