Alice Garik is an artist who explores and expresses our interconnections, through our bodies, with nature.  With this visceral connection at the core of her work, she uses photographic processes requiring drawing and painting on organically sourced handmade papers.  She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Art and Photography Studies

Her studies with Philip Guston and Theordoros Stamos as an undergraduate at Brandeis University informs her foundation in painting and drawing.  She also participated as an artist resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Fascinated by the immediacy of photography and the creative work in the darkroom, Garik pursued photojournalism at The New School, studied with the editors of National Geographic at the University of Missouri, studied with Eikoh Hosoe at The Center for Photography at Woodstock and was a photography intern at The Village Voice.  She studied alternative printing and fine art conceptual practices at the International Center for Photography.

Photographing Dancers and Women’s Stories

Garik’s interests in the human form and photographic movement studies led her to photograph dancers and dance performances.  From 1994-1996, DANCE INK commissioned her to photograph dancer and choreographer Neil Greenberg and ABT dancer Angel Corella.

Garik used her alternative printing to tell stories of the rural life in Vermont.  She photographed with a 4X5″ camera and, using the painterly process of palladium printing, formed a grid of four photographs together to tell expanded stories of people and landscape.  In 1999, when ORION Magazine commissioned her to illustrate an article on perception, she used this method.

Experiencing our society’s disconnection from respecting women, children and nature, Garik looked to myths and fairy tales to articulate these missing connections.  With the Grimm fairy tale, “Brother, Sister”, Garik worked on a series of photographs with an actress and began using natural artifacts as symbols:  a deer antler and a rose to symbolize caring for a wild faun and giving birth to a child.

Biological Transformations

She also looked at the transformations for women to motherhood.  To document this life changing biological process, Garik would photograph the fully pregnant woman and hold the 4X5″ negatives until the baby was born to now photograph the baby.  These compressed photographs told the story of the woman, her biological transformation and her newly birthed baby. The methods she developed capturing mother and child were then applied to her most recent series, superimposing and compressing images of bodies with flora and fauna.

Poetic Merging of Tattoos within Nature

Beginning in 2015, Garik’s daughter started to explore how her sense of self moved out from her flesh by having tattoos.   One of her first tattoos was Daphne from the Greek myth.  This inspired Garik to explore how tattoos, embedded with myths, icons, plants and animals, express human veneration of nature. In this current body of work, she layers elements of the natural world with photographs she takes of people’s tattoos, proposing her own visual meditation on mending our severed connection to nature.

Collections and Exhibits

Garik’s work is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Public Library, The Polaroid Collection among others.  She has executed illustrations for book covers and her work has been on the sets of several popular movies and TV series.  Work from her current project was exhibited in 2017 in “Tattooed New-York” at The New-York Historical Society in NYC.  In 2020 Alice exhibited in an online exhibit with the Berlin Collectiv and in another curated exhibition, “Naturatis” in 2021.  In 2021 two portfolios were selected for the online exhibit “(Nature In) Lockdown” in Floresta Magazine.  Garik exhibited in “The Art of Coney Island” at The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in the summer of 2021.  In the fall of 2021 her work was exhibited in “Oc.cu.pied”, a curated exhibition of art by women, as part of Arts Gowanus Open Studios in Brooklyn.  In the spring of 2022, Alice exhibited in “Fragile Rainbow:  Traversing Habitats”, curated by Sue Spaid with members of EcoArtSpace and in “Act Natural” an online Berlin Collectiv exhibition.  In summer 2022, Garik exhibited with BWAC in the show “More Art of Coney Island”.  In 2023, Garik’s work is now part of White Column’s curated artist registry.  At the start of 2024 she is exhibiting with AzureArtsNYC in a curated three artist exhibit on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Through February 2024, her work is featured in the lobby of The Brooklyn Workspace, Brooklyn, NY.