With gestural swipes of perfectly calibrated colors and tones, Matt Bollinger’s subjects face their viewer with earnest directness, creating an exchange in either empathy or implication within the failing social equation of laissez-faire economics, as if to question, “which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”

With jewel-studded decay and pustuled baloney, Garner brilliantly demonstrates that beauty is never irrevocably tied to benevolence (violence has its splendor too, and tragedy its comedic twin) and that through the embrace of the abject, The Other can be twisted in-side-out, both symbolically and literally, unsettling our sense of self and the socio-historic ground it rests on.