Garrett Hibbard

Artist Statement

My practice is rooted in figurative Surrealism and Symbolism, using dense, maximalist imagery to examine power, guilt, desire, and complicity within contemporary systems. I work across painting, drawing, and handmade garments, treating each surface as a site for narrative accumulation rather than resolution.
Recurring figures—demons, angels, ghosts, televisions, cigarettes, and other motifs—function as a shifting visual language throughout my work. These symbols are not fixed; they mutate across pieces, accumulating meaning through repetition and contradiction. Demons in particular are central to my practice: not as embodiments of evil, but as figures navigating moral ambiguity, shame, and the pursuit of virtue after failure.
My work is deliberately confrontational yet open-ended. Saturated color, crowded composition, and layered text create environments that resist passive viewing, mirroring the psychological and cultural noise of modern life. Humor, irony, and absurdity are often used as entry points, drawing viewers in before implicating them in the underlying social and emotional tensions at play.
Coming from a background in aerospace engineering, I bring a systems-oriented way of thinking into my art—examining how individuals operate within larger ideological, political, and cultural structures. Much of my work interrogates the tension between rebellion and obedience, agency and control, and the ways meaning is mediated through spectacle, media, and myth.
Ultimately, my practice is less interested in offering answers than in creating spaces for discomfort, recognition, and self-reflection. The work asks viewers to connect the dots—or refuse to—and to consider where they locate themselves within the systems and stories being depicted.