Garrett Gassman

I was never your enemy.. I was your lover..

Modern Day Villain.

Modern day villain.

Surreal Memory was the beginning of my pursuit to create work that explores the human condition. After I left Portland in 2020 and moved across the country, I bounced from place to place for years, trying to find somewhere to settle. I landed in San Diego and spent a couple years on another collection, Negative Abstraction. I was trying to build off the back of Surreal Memory. It never worked. It never carried the same weight. Surreal Memory came out of a very specific time, and Negative Abstraction was me digging for something similar. Forcing it. So when I left San Diego and moved back to Portland, I took it down and got rid of it. Because I’d stopped looking at my surroundings and started looking inward. At what I was actually feeling.

That’s when I got started on From the Shadows.

Surreal Memory.

Surreal Memory is a small collection made in 2020 by Garrett Gassman during the covid lock downs, while stuck in Portland, OR, Garrett began working on a series of images that focus on isolation and creating a visual representation of a dream or memory like state.

Surreal Memory was a collection I made in 2020, trying to emulate what that time felt like. It was surreal. Empty. Faded. Days blurred in and out and the world just felt like it was passing by. When I made it, I didn’t really understand what I’d created. Not until later, after I left Portland and moved across the country. Only then could I step out of it, look back, and see what it actually was. That’s when it dawned on me. I’d discovered a way of seeing. Something well past conventional photography, past just making a nice picture. It was about creating, conceptually, what it felt like to be inside that moment. That’s where my voice started. It’s evolved dramatically since.

Surreal Memory.

Surreal Memory is a small collection made in 2020 by Garrett Gassman during the covid lock downs, while stuck in Portland, OR, Garrett began working on a series of images that focus on isolation and creating a visual representation of a dream or memory like state.