Untitled
Mixed media on wood
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.
This work was part of Breaking Patterns, Garner’s 2018 solo exhibition at the Epicurean Hotel in Tampa. The show opened November 2, 2018, and was presented through CASS Contemporary; local coverage described Garner as one of the Bay area’s standout illustrators and designers, particularly known for his intricately designed concert posters. Works from this larger body were later installed at Élevage, also at the Epicurean.
The title of the exhibition is both literal and metaphorical. Garner builds the composition with stunning density that never collapses into noise: geometric florals, stars, concentric forms, botanical silhouettes, and repeated marks. Through this, the eye keeps finding new rhythms, interruptions, and small visual jokes.
The black-and-white halftone image of a man and woman anchors the exuberant surface. There’s something simultaneously romantic and vaguely dystopian about the scene: an almost archetypal Atomic Age couple, cigarettes in hand, seemingly headed toward an open horizon. It carries the optimism of a mid-century America that once believed deeply in its own future—including a time when smoking could still be marketed as sophisticated, glamorous, even healthy.
Then comes the joke in the rearview mirror: the joint. That small substitution quietly flips the meaning of the image, pointing to how quickly ideas of vice, virtue, danger, and acceptability can change. What once read as wholesome sophistication now looks reckless; what was once criminalized has, in many places, become culturally ordinary. Garner lets that contradiction sit there without overexplaining it.
Surrounded by florals, geometric patterns, desert-like forms, and an almost radiating sun, the couple begins to feel less like a nostalgic photograph and more like a fragment of a vanished future. The piece is playful, romantic, and darkly funny—a reminder that the values attached to everyday objects are often far less permanent than the objects themselves.
That is where the metaphor lives: inherited ideas, aesthetics, and promises that look very different once you’re far enough away from them.
Untitled
Mixed media on wood
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.
This work was part of Breaking Patterns, Garner’s 2018 solo exhibition at the Epicurean Hotel in Tampa. The show opened November 2, 2018, and was presented through CASS Contemporary; local coverage described Garner as one of the Bay area’s standout illustrators and designers, particularly known for his intricately designed concert posters. Works from this larger body were later installed at Élevage, also at the Epicurean.
The title of the exhibition is both literal and metaphorical. Garner builds the composition with stunning density that never collapses into noise: geometric florals, stars, concentric forms, botanical silhouettes, and repeated marks. Through this, the eye keeps finding new rhythms, interruptions, and small visual jokes.
The black-and-white halftone image of a man and woman anchors the exuberant surface. There’s something simultaneously romantic and vaguely dystopian about the scene: an almost archetypal Atomic Age couple, cigarettes in hand, seemingly headed toward an open horizon. It carries the optimism of a mid-century America that once believed deeply in its own future—including a time when smoking could still be marketed as sophisticated, glamorous, even healthy.
Then comes the joke in the rearview mirror: the joint. That small substitution quietly flips the meaning of the image, pointing to how quickly ideas of vice, virtue, danger, and acceptability can change. What once read as wholesome sophistication now looks reckless; what was once criminalized has, in many places, become culturally ordinary. Garner lets that contradiction sit there without overexplaining it.
Surrounded by florals, geometric patterns, desert-like forms, and an almost radiating sun, the couple begins to feel less like a nostalgic photograph and more like a fragment of a vanished future. The piece is playful, romantic, and darkly funny—a reminder that the values attached to everyday objects are often far less permanent than the objects themselves.
That is where the metaphor lives: inherited ideas, aesthetics, and promises that look very different once you’re far enough away from them.
