prehistoricsoul LAB

John McGarity / USA

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the197

John McGarity is a Brooklyn-based visual artist working across painting, video, installation, and artifact fabrication. Drawing on a BFA in Photography/Film/Video from UMBC (1992) and an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute (2001), his practice uses material process, layering, collage logic, improvised sets, and hybrid object-making, to probe how identity is authored, circulated, and disciplined. His works often borrow from folklore and vernacular symbolism as a way to re-stage familiar narratives, allowing them to fracture into new readings: part confession, part performance, part relic.

McGarity’s projects move between image and object, treating the studio like a lab where paintings can behave like screens, videos can feel like icons, and installations operate as temporary shrines. He builds surfaces through accretion and abrasion, stacking paint, printed matter, and hand-made elements, so that meaning emerges like an excavation rather than a declaration. Conceptually, he’s interested in social power structures and spiritual revelation as overlapping systems: how belief is built, how authority is visualized, and what gets preserved as “legacy,” both personal and cultural. The work often stages a productive tension between sincerity and satire, using the familiar language of ceremony, theater, and devotion to invite viewers into spaces where the symbolic and the lived continually rewrite each other. Whether a piece begins as a painting, a video, or an object, it tends to resolve as an environment, an encounter that asks what we inherit, what we perform, and what we choose to keep.

Recent presentations and research have continued to expand this multimedia approach, including solo exhibitions at Gallery Blue Door (Baltimore, 2024), Munro Gallery (Port Jervis, 2024), The Siloen (Drammen, Norway, 2024), NART (Narva, Estonia, 2025), and Collapsable Hole (New York, 2025), and Kokoro Art Gallery (Lucknow, India, 2026). His recent residencies include I-Park (Connecticut, 2024), Union AiR (Drammen, 2024), Narva Artist Residency / NART (Estonia, 2025), and prehistoricsoul (Bali, 2025), alongside exhibitions such as Rochester Contemporary Art Center’s Built Environments (2024) and Experimental Loop on Governors Island (2024).

John at prehistoricsoul LAB

During his residency at LAB John McGarity worked across performance, painting, and video. In collaboration with I Gusti Dibal Ranuh, he collaborated on Napak Toya project, a multimedia performance project. The project wove together sound, gesture, dance and visual elements, drawing from the cultural and ecological frameworks of the subak irrigation tradition.

Alongside this project, he created a series of three paintings titled Gang Margot 1–3, reflecting his observations of spatial rhythms and everyday architectures encountered during the residency. He also created a short video work focused on the traditional Balinese Kecak dance, known for its large circle of performers chanting rhythmic “cak” sounds in unison.