Garrett Gassman

I'll Smoke Your Love was a piece where I really wanted to emulate that kind of emptiness we feel when we don't have a partner, someone to love or to love us. This was a way for me to visualize what that feels like, and how we often distract ourselves with partying, alcohol, or other things. But truthfully, deep down, we all long to have someone, to have that other half of us.

For this piece, I took a concept I had from eight years ago and revisited it, building on top of it. My partner is in this photograph, and combining these two concepts symbolized the end of that longing for me. I feel like I have found love, and seeing that emotion I felt for so long finally on the wall, in that moment of feeling connected, is a special thing.

Printing your work is allowing it to live in the world with you and with other people. So much of what we create gets posted on the internet and left there for people to browse, but not enough artists actually get to the point of printing their work. I think that's the most important part in bringing it into the world. Whether it's digital or film, it doesn't matter, it's a second form of creation on top of what you've already made. If you don't print your work, you never really get to see it fully alive.

The more I print my work, the more I realize I don't want to create just to share it with people on the internet. I want to create because when I see it alive in person, on my walls or in a gallery, when I get to experience it in its full size, it takes on a different life. It holds its own meaning at that point.

It's kind of like how we, as people, grow up, raised and guided by our parents, and in many ways it's the same thing. We create something, we try to emulate something, and then once it's in the world, it's allowed to take on its own life and form. It's sad to me to see people take that for granted, mass producing their work as a product. It cheapens the depth in what they're creating and what they're trying to say. It strips the entire life out of it.

That's why I don't mass produce my work. I create either one of three, or one of five editions, and I'm going to stay true to that my whole career, because I want there to be a limited number of people who truly get to experience it. A good artist and a good collector see something together, through their own lenses, and experiencing something together makes it more valuable. It adds depth when something has scarcity, when you create something and you actually care who it goes to, rather than trying to appeal to the masses.

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Over the course of ten years doing this, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what the real priorities are in being an artist. Like many other artists, doing the work is one of the most important things, and it's fundamental. But as you grow, as you try to build your positioning and scale your art career, you start to understand that being locked away doing the work alone is only half the battle. In fact, it isn't going to work if that's all you're doing.

Having a solid foundation and structure means having a plan, a strategy, a system built for the operations that push you and your work out into the world. A lot of people say that's social media and the platforms you post on, and yes, that's a major part of it, but it's more than that. In the age of social media, we post, people engage, and we hope someone will love it, like it, or purchase it. That's just not how things work anymore. Now we have to gain attention, and then convert it into something internal, something in our own system.

For me, that was building the Collector's List. That was building my site to not just be another portfolio, but a directory of my work, and to let my social presence focus on telling the narrative and gaining attention, but ultimately sending people to the Collector's List, because that's the exclusive list for everything, sales, exhibitions, communications. It is fundamentally the thing I actually own. It's also the main list for the studio, and in order to purchase or even attend my exhibitions, members and collectors have to be on the list. That's something I'm able to control, and it makes sure nobody misses my show or misses the opportunity to go. At any minute, your account can get hacked, blocked, or restricted, and you lose access to the tens of thousands of people you had.

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Some Will Fall Away is a very unique piece because my intention with it was to give real weight to what happens in our lives when we lose the people closest to us. As we grow, the foundation we stand on starts to crack and crumble, much like the texture in this piece. It starts to break apart and show signs of aging and wear. Some Will Fall Away speaks to how sometimes loss is not loss, it is growth. And sometimes the aging and the cracks in our foundation can be a beautiful thing.

Some will fall away.