Untitled
Spray paint on cardboard
Dimensions forthcoming
Conrad Garner is a Tampa-based artist, illustrator, and designer whose work merges vintage visual language with a distinctly contemporary graphic sensibility. Drawing influence from old advertising, packaging, cartoons, concert posters, and other fragments of popular culture, Garner grounds the sharp wit of his work in bold color, layered pattern, and hand-drawn imagery.
Created during the summer of 2020, this work belongs to the same series of improvised still lifes Garner made on found substrates during COVID. Here, a large piece of cardboard becomes both surface and subject matter: humble, temporary, and inseparable from a moment when nearly everything seemed to arrive at the front door in a box.
Garner centers the composition on a blue bottle marked with an eye and three Xs, turning an ordinary object into something more charged. The eye can evoke the all-seeing eye found in Christian iconography, Freemasonry, and later Illuminati imagery, while also recalling the protective evil-eye tradition used to ward off envy or ill intent. That ambiguity gives the bottle a slightly talismanic quality — part warning, part protection, part joke.
Around it, loose fields of red, yellow, brown, and white, along with drips, overspray, and repeating stencil motifs, carry the visual language of street art and commercial graphics. The cardboard remains visibly creased, taped, and worn, which gives the piece a casual physicality and, in retrospect, another layer of wit. In a year defined by staying home and having the outside world delivered to us, even the packaging became part of the visual culture of everyday life.
Untitled
Spray paint on cardboard
Dimensions forthcoming
Conrad Garner is a Tampa-based artist, illustrator, and designer whose work merges vintage visual language with a distinctly contemporary graphic sensibility. Drawing influence from old advertising, packaging, cartoons, concert posters, and other fragments of popular culture, Garner grounds the sharp wit of his work in bold color, layered pattern, and hand-drawn imagery.
Created during the summer of 2020, this work belongs to the same series of improvised still lifes Garner made on found substrates during COVID. Here, a large piece of cardboard becomes both surface and subject matter: humble, temporary, and inseparable from a moment when nearly everything seemed to arrive at the front door in a box.
Garner centers the composition on a blue bottle marked with an eye and three Xs, turning an ordinary object into something more charged. The eye can evoke the all-seeing eye found in Christian iconography, Freemasonry, and later Illuminati imagery, while also recalling the protective evil-eye tradition used to ward off envy or ill intent. That ambiguity gives the bottle a slightly talismanic quality — part warning, part protection, part joke.
Around it, loose fields of red, yellow, brown, and white, along with drips, overspray, and repeating stencil motifs, carry the visual language of street art and commercial graphics. The cardboard remains visibly creased, taped, and worn, which gives the piece a casual physicality and, in retrospect, another layer of wit. In a year defined by staying home and having the outside world delivered to us, even the packaging became part of the visual culture of everyday life.
