Kyler Garrison: Painting Memory in the Post-Internet Age
Kyler Garrison (b. 2001) is a Brooklyn-based, self-taught painter whose work explores memory, nostalgia, and the influence of digital culture on personal recollection. Raised in a post-internet era, Garrison is particularly interested in how the constant influx of online information reshapes and fragments our perception of the past. His airbrush-heavy acrylic paintings evoke the hazy, dreamlike quality of half-remembered experiences—where details are distorted, emotions are heightened, and reality is blurred by digital interference.
Garrison’s artistic roots stem from skateboarding and graffiti, but his work has evolved into a distinctive visual language that merges personal and collective memory. His paintings do not claim to document the past with accuracy but instead reflect the fallibility of memory itself. Like a pop song that conjures a feeling rather than a precise moment, his work invites viewers to confront how their own memories are shaped by culture, nostalgia, and emotional residue.
His early exhibitions include Pop Song (2022) at Village Manchester in collaboration with Screw Gallery, a solo show examining memory’s subjective nature and its relationship to pop culture. In Memory Echoes (2023) at Lorin Gallery LA, a duo exhibition with sculptor Andrew Orloski, Garrison explored digital-era recollection through blurred, fragmented imagery juxtaposed against Orloski’s sculptural interrogations of material permanence. His solo exhibition Body of Armor (2023) at Plan X Gallery in Milan further developed these themes, leading to participation in CAN Art Ibiza and Art Dubai in 2024.
His most recent solo show, Hold My Hand While I Google Symptoms (2024-25) at Carl Kostyal London, delves into anxiety, control, and the search for comfort in an era of digital oversaturation. The act of compulsively searching for medical symptoms becomes a metaphor for the broader human impulse to find certainty in an unstable world—a pursuit that often leads to more confusion than clarity.
Garrison’s work thrives in the tension between reality and fiction, memory and myth. He paints experience not as it was, but as it feels—filtered through the fog of nostalgia, pop culture, and subjective perception. His paintings remind us that memory is not a record, but a story we tell ourselves—one constantly rewritten by time, emotion, and the digital age.
