"world of water" show at cornell Museum Apr 7-Jun 25, 2023

"But if I could name a personal “Best in Show,” it would be the suite of works from Ron Garrett, a Boca Ratonian whose hanging sculpture “Manatee’s Lament” provided the DDA’s cultural arts director, Marusca Gatto, and co-curator Debby Coles-Dobay with the spark for this exhibition. Garrett’s multimedia art mourns the defiled beauty of ocean life. “Manatee’s Lament” suspends from the gallery ceiling as a life-size reminder of our impact on these charismatic megafauna, its fin sliced by a propeller, its body sculpted entirely from the up-cycled debris that has crept into its polluted home.

Man’s unthinking destruction of marine life is rendered even more explicitly on “Fate,” a grimly titled site-specific sculpture of a hammerhead shark, its body dragging a motley assemblage of deadly detritus—a tire, a giant hook, bubble wrap, netting, rope, Styrofoam, plastic bottles, a broken surfboard. The sculpture puts into stark relief the statistics we hear, and then usually disregard, about our garbage’s effect on ocean habitats.

Garrett’s paintings are no less consumed with issues of ocean conservation. The somewhat cartoonish imagery of “Red Tide”—a series of identical fish, dead and upside down and eyes wide open, against a blood-red backdrop—does little to ease its constructive anger. Like the best of Garrett’s work, it’s the watery equivalent of the roadside car wreck: both difficult to see and difficult to look away."  John Thomason

"Boca Raton-based artist and printmaker Ron Garrett’s Manatee Lament, is a 84 x 32 x 26 mixed-media sculpture of a “tearful, life-sized gentle giant.” The manatee, created with recycled materials, ocean debris and detritus, depicts a manatee with visible motor boat scars on his back. “I hope to bring attention to the plight of the manatees by creating her from the threats she faces,” says Garrett, founder of RagaPress, a fine art printmaking atelier in Boca Raton.

Also on display is his found objects/upcycled debris sculpture of a hammerhead shark entangled in debris, meant to jar our subconscious about threatened marine life. The word “fate” is emblazoned on the side of the shark. Inspired by surrealists such as Max Ernst, Garrett also gives credit to Dr. Seuss for the whimsical elements in his work. “He was very important to me as a child,” he says.

Growing up in Florida, Garrett remembers the days of farms and dirt roads, before development and gated communities took over the area. Never at a shortage for ideas, he says they’re triggered by objects he sees that morph into ideas which then become a “well of ideas.” His series of sunken ships, done in celebration of Biscayne National Park’s 50th anniversary in 2018, brings to life many of the underwater shipwrecks and tales of ancient mariners, now preserved as the Maritime Heritage Trail. For his next project, he hopes to visit some or all of Florida’s 175 state parks and create a printmaking portfolio to be titled Florida the Beautiful. “I feel a connection to primordial Florida,” he says. “I can attest to the last minutes of pioneer Florida and want to create an awareness that we are all part of the ecology and environment in Florida and we need to preserve it.”" Jan Engoren Apr 24