Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.
Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.
Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.
SuicideGirls spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.
Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?
Camille Rose Garcia: I'm in Northern California. I lived in LA forever but we moved up here a few years ago, and I live in the middle of the woods.
NP: In your own Wonderland.
CRG: Yes, in my own Wonderland. We're almost to Oregon, seven hours north of San Francisco.
NP: What made you want to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland?
CRG: Actually, the editor from Harper Collins, Liz [Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan], gave me a call. It was kind of her idea. It was already in my head from a couple of years ago, I'd been talking with Disney about doing something with Alice In Wonderland. So it made it a lot easier since I already had an idea of the characters I wanted to do. When she called me I thought that's perfect timing to do the book. I had some other projects lined up but I was like, I can swing it. I can do it. I can pull some late nights.
NP: What do you personally see down the rabbit hole in Carroll's story? And what wasn't fulfilled for you by the original illustrations?
CRG: Well the original illustrations by [John] Tenniel have always been some of my favorites. I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations. Because you got a little bit of a hint of the stuff that was going on, but not really [a sense] of the extent of it. There's a lot of drug references as well, so I wanted this one to be psychedelic referencing that.
NP: Talk about some of the visual vocabulary used in the illustrations.
CRG: Well I did want to reference '60s psychedelia. I'm not sure where that comes from, although it's probably the mushrooms.
NP: There are mushrooms in virtually all of your images.
CRG: Yeah. I think a lot of bands and things in the '60s seemed to reference Alice In Wonderland -- I guess Jefferson Airplane, the famous song "White Rabbit." There seemed to be a lot of '60s crossover with the psychedelic imagery, so the colors were very bright, kind of really happy, a lot of purples and pinks and yellows.
I was listening to T-Rex and David Bowie. They're more '70s, but to me I think of the '70s Bowie as very psychedelic. I wanted those colors, but then the characters themselves are a little darker, a little meaner, a little more severe. You have this contrast of the really super bright drug references with this more gothic element.
NP: The way you depict Alice, she could be a kid or she could be a 35-year old. I'm looking at the frame for the opening poem "All In A Golden Afternoon." You've got Alice looking beyond drowsy, almost like she's suffering the aftereffects of a party the night before, and she's surrounded by love hearts and you've drawn a bottle near her, nestled in the grass, that looks suspiciously like booze.
CRG: Yeah, she's definitely a substance abuser. But that was something I found interesting from the original illustrations, you can't really figure out how old she is, and in a lot of different illustrations of Alice over the years they've made her a little girl, they've made her older. In the animated Disney version she is more like 18, she's a lot older. I was kind of playing with that. In one version I had her older and a little more tarted up, a little sexier. But I didn't want to get into those issues.
NP: Sexualizing a children's story.
CRG: Yeah. I do have a lot of child fans. I thought there's going to be a lot of 7-year olds looking at this. I wanted to keep the drug and alcohol references in there because I thought it was important, but not [go] totally over-the-top. I made her kind of 12, on the verge of being an older person, but it comes down to 'Do you give her boobs or not?'
NP: She's got quite a puffy top on her dress so you can't really tell.
CRG: Yeah, 'cause when I was drawing that I thought, 'Would she have cleavage?' Not really. That was the ultimate problem; would she have boobs or not? But she's definitely drinking, so I guess she's like a 12-year old boozer.
NP: It is the interesting dichotomy with Carroll's story. On the surface it's a fairytale for children, but it works on another level as a drug-fueled nightmare for adults. And the perception of the story changes as you grow. Do you remember the time when you saw it through more innocent eyes? And how did your perception change?
CRG: I do remember. I remember reading the story and looking at the original illustrations, and it was one perception, like, "This is weird." I loved the rabbit from a very child-like perspective. Then being a teenager and listening to a lot of music and taking mushrooms and doing all this stuff, and also going to Disneyland, they have a whole Alice in Wonderland ride, there's all these layered references from my druggy teen years. Also realizing how many bands and other people are referencing the darker stuff.
But only upon when I took this project on, and re-read this story again, very intimately, trying to find more visual clues, [did I] realize really how dark it is. It's like a really bad trip. The Queen threatens to behead her at one pint, and they're drugging her, really there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So from an adult perspective it kind of reminds me more of the old Germanic folk tales where the kids were always getting killed or ran off into the forest or actual bad things happened to them.
NP: In America, we tend to want to wrap our kids up in petal pink and powder blue and tell them fluffy fairy tales, but in reality children's own tastes are far more macabre, which I think is part of the appeal of Alice. The reality of Alice's Wonderland is quite nightmarish, but kids will happily giggle as the queen shouts, "Off with their heads." But you never get to see the consequences. I always wondered about the resulting pile of decapitated bodies.
CRG: I feel like American culture in general is very much afraid to show children anything outside of a puppy/marshmallow SpongeBob world. But in the fairytales throughout history it was very important to teach people consequences. Oftentimes kids would die at the end or they'd get shoved in the oven, or they'd be beheaded or turned into a frog. There were always these much darker things happening and I feel like in the American versions of a lot of children's stories, that element is sanitized out.
And I think the time we're living in now, it's really important for kids to be aware of [the fact that] there a bad things in the world happening. There are things to be scared of, but that's how you grow and mature. You have to face your fears, so I wanted to keep some of that darkness in there...People underestimate kids a lot in terms of what they can handle. I know there are things that are appropriate and not, but I think American culture in particular is very sterilized when it comes to children's literature.
NP: But we also mollycoddle our adults. Take for example the gulf war and the policy of hiding the dead and the wounded from us. We don't see the consequences, the bodies of those we've killed. Nor do we see the bodies of our own troops.
CRG: I think again with American culture we're really infantilized. We're like an infantile culture that has an inability to deal with bad news, and that is prevalent across the board in America. Even talking about anything real, or showing somebody an image of something real that's happening in the world, people don't want to deal with it. They don't want to see it, they don't want to talk about it, and I think it's really kind of psychotic to not address everything that's actually happening in the world, to not even want to know about it.
NP: Yeah, I was watching a clip today of the cast of Jersey Shore being interviewed on a so-called news show.
CRG: Oooh, I was just looking at that and I was thinking I can't believe that this guy is somebody that has to be in my consciousness...
NP: That's all a part of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry in general being this Wonderland for the world that distracts us from the dark stuff that's going on that we should actually be paying attention to.
CRG: It seems too that the darker the world gets the more people really do have a need for that distraction. I mean Michael Jackson's death went on for three or four months on CNN to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. And that's just not very balanced.
NP: I know you grew up not far from Disneyland, which itself has many parallels to Carroll's story. On the surface it's this world famous wonderland, but the flipside is, if you grew up near it, it just became this place for bored local kids to go and get fucked up on drugs.
CRG: It was really the best place to take acid. And the contrast here I think is this idea of suburbia as the safest place, the happiest place. That's the thing to achieve in Western culture, Disneyland being at the pinnacle, the cherry on top of the happiest, best, safest place to be. When, in reality, to have a world that is paved over in concrete with all indigenous plants and animals removed and replaced by fake plants and animals, that's not something the world should strive towards as a collective goal. So there definitely are two sides to that.
NP: Throughout your various books, collections and exhibitions (The Saddest Place On Earth, Tragic Kingdom, etc.), your work has very much been influenced by growing up in the shadow of Disneyland. And it seems to have had a profound effect on a whole generation of kids from Orange County. How did the OC, this perfect vision of 1950's suburbia, become such a Tragic Kingdom?
CRG: For a longtime I had real strong ideas about relationships between suburbia and fascism, having this ber perfect goal to be cleansed of anything strange or different. There's a real xenophobia in Orange County that's very dark.
NP: But then you look at Disney movies, it's taken until 2010 for them to release a movie starring a black princess.
CRG: The image of perfection in fantasy and fairytales is it completely removed of multicultural things. In the '70s we had Sesame Street that was trying to introduce that, but I think for the most part, especially in Disney and Southern California and the white middle class, their idea of perfection didn't involve any other cultures. Disney did travel to other cultures, but you can see how we sort of worship Germanic castles and all these European influences.
NP: And if you look at most of the set-in-suburbia dramas and soap operas on TV, they set up very unreal expectations. For example in Desperate Housewives, Mike Delfino is a plumber yet he lives in this gorgeous, million dollar plus suburban home. Kids have grown up with this promise of what suburban life should afford that they have no way of attaining for themselves.
CRG: Yes, and it's already crumbling because their parents are now in foreclosure and can't afford those houses. It's kind of like the collective fantasy of suburbia. It's not real. It's not working. This faade is falling apart. These kids that have grown up in those cultures aren't prepared at all for what's coming, for fighting over resources globally and global economic collapse. They're just not prepared at all for any of that.
NP: Talking of the American fairytale that's come crashing down, I was reading an interview you did that was first published on Sept 16, 2006 on a website called Crown Dozen where you very specifically predicted the global economic crash:
CRG: Well I had a lot of other people I was reading that were talking about it long before it happened. All these bankers, now the big lie is "Oh, we didn't know." They knew. It was written about extensively. They knew exactly what was happening and they knew how they were going to get their money out. It just becomes part of the collective lie. That's the thing, I think American culture is just a series of collective lies presented to us.
NP: I agree. When people were signing these mortgages that they never had any prospect of being able to afford, they were signing on the back of a fairytale. They were sold a fairytale.
CRG: Yeah, and along with the mortgage you get the anti-depressant drugs. It kind of reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick stories where the characters, they're taking these drugs because they're living on Mars and they want to pretend they're living on earth. It's like you need the drug to continue the fantasy of the lie. You can't have the lie without the anti-depressants.
NP: I guess that's what you explored in your 2008 Ambien Somnambulants show.
CRG: Yeah, exactly. The sleepwalking. Interestingly, going back to Alice, I found it actually really amazing when I thought about it, why there are so few female heroes in literature and children's literature - especially of that time period. Here was this young girl that had an opinion, had her ideas about things, and wasn't being railroaded over by adults or anyone in the story. I hadn't really though about that before. And that's really an interesting perspective. I bet it didn't come out of that period very often. Young girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, and not have opinions.
NP: That's part of Alice's charm, she doesn't say what's she expected to say. The big end is that she stands up to the kangaroo court and tells her elders and those in authority that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards."
CRG: Yeah, and flips them over, creates anarchy and runs off.
NP: The saddest thing about that ending for me is that that play on words is lost because most people today don't realize that "card" back then was another word for "joker" or "fool."
CRG: Yes, the puns are very specific, and a lot of them are English specific. Like I didn't know what "whiting" was, that it was also a fish. Certain things are very English and from the Victorian era. Upon re-reading it closer it was like, "Oh, OK! I never got that part." Re-reading it very closely was a joy, to think about it on a deeper level, of all those other themes going on.
NP: Children are taught to blindly respect authority, and the great thing about Alice is that she doesn't. We need to encourage that more. Going back to your Ambien Somnambulants idea that many of us sleepwalk through life, I always consider apathy to be the greatest facilitator of evil.
CRG: Wow, yeah. Just doing nothing.
NP: But then kids are taught that as long as something is presented by someone in authority, you're not really supposed to challenge it.
CRG: Yeah. That's the thing, again going back to her challenging and being so opinionated, it kind of ties into the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s. All that, all of the bra-burning and now we're at this point where young people, they don't have a lot of role models still. Even if you're great singer you still have to be half naked. You have to have that thing too to be famous. That is the message.
NP: I guess if Mattel made Alice she would have impossibly large breasts.
CRG: She's have huge boobs, but she'd be 12. [laughs] It's like, non-threatening but hot. She would never be a '50s buxom kind of [female]. That's the other thing, thinking of the females of the '50s that were powerful but bigger, now there's this cult of petite, harmless females. It becomes very confusing when drawing boobs or not drawing boobs, 'cause the size of the boob in relation to the rest of the body is like an indicator of power.
NP: But is that indicative of physical power over mental power?
CRG: I don't know. I was just thinking about anytime I'm confronted with having to draw boobs or no boobs. It determines how old I'm making a character. It's always a very confusing issue because I don't want to make them too big, because that plays into this weird like Japanese manga fetishization of the boob. But then you make them too small and she's 10 or 12, and it gets into the weird pedophile grey area. So I never know what to do with the boobs when I'm drawing them.
NP: It's kind of sad that that was your biggest issue when drawing Alice.
CRG: Yeah, because it's like, should she be older? But then it's totally wrong to have her too sexy. It was distracting. Her character in the story is mentally powerful and mentally challenging. I mean, I wanted to make her interesting, but sexy is sort of a one-note thing.
NP: But then that plays into the stereotype that you can't be blonde with big boobs and have intellectually powerful arguments.
CRG: Yeah, that you can't have both. It's a conundrum right? But then she can't be ugly right? You can't have an ugly little girl, that's totally not allowed. It's funny, just drawing these things and amending them, and thinking about all these visual clues.
NP: Obviously LA and the OC has provided a massive amount of inspiration for your work, but now you live in the middle of the woods not far from Oregon. What effects have your new surroundings had on your work?
CRG: I was born and raised in LA, and I don't it's a great idea to live all your life in one place. I think it's good to scare yourself, and, if you have the means, to try out new situations. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to live in nature - like really in it - and not be surrounded by convenience all the time.
The area we live in, it's really beautiful. It's within the boundaries of National Forest and National Park, so it is a preserved area. That's really inspiring because there's intact eco-systems and giant redwood trees, all these things that just seem other-worldly. In a way it makes me sad because I feel that there's not many of these places left anymore. We've destroyed a lot of them...I don't know how much longer we're going to last here in society, and I want to be able to live in this before it gets destroyed.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. An exhibition of original art from the book will be held at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens on March 6th with a special book release party. Garcia will subsequently embark on a West Coast book signing tour. Go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/ for further details.
Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.
Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.
SuicideGirls spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.
Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?
Camille Rose Garcia: I'm in Northern California. I lived in LA forever but we moved up here a few years ago, and I live in the middle of the woods.
NP: In your own Wonderland.
CRG: Yes, in my own Wonderland. We're almost to Oregon, seven hours north of San Francisco.
NP: What made you want to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland?
CRG: Actually, the editor from Harper Collins, Liz [Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan], gave me a call. It was kind of her idea. It was already in my head from a couple of years ago, I'd been talking with Disney about doing something with Alice In Wonderland. So it made it a lot easier since I already had an idea of the characters I wanted to do. When she called me I thought that's perfect timing to do the book. I had some other projects lined up but I was like, I can swing it. I can do it. I can pull some late nights.
NP: What do you personally see down the rabbit hole in Carroll's story? And what wasn't fulfilled for you by the original illustrations?
CRG: Well the original illustrations by [John] Tenniel have always been some of my favorites. I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations. Because you got a little bit of a hint of the stuff that was going on, but not really [a sense] of the extent of it. There's a lot of drug references as well, so I wanted this one to be psychedelic referencing that.
NP: Talk about some of the visual vocabulary used in the illustrations.
CRG: Well I did want to reference '60s psychedelia. I'm not sure where that comes from, although it's probably the mushrooms.
NP: There are mushrooms in virtually all of your images.
CRG: Yeah. I think a lot of bands and things in the '60s seemed to reference Alice In Wonderland -- I guess Jefferson Airplane, the famous song "White Rabbit." There seemed to be a lot of '60s crossover with the psychedelic imagery, so the colors were very bright, kind of really happy, a lot of purples and pinks and yellows.
I was listening to T-Rex and David Bowie. They're more '70s, but to me I think of the '70s Bowie as very psychedelic. I wanted those colors, but then the characters themselves are a little darker, a little meaner, a little more severe. You have this contrast of the really super bright drug references with this more gothic element.
NP: The way you depict Alice, she could be a kid or she could be a 35-year old. I'm looking at the frame for the opening poem "All In A Golden Afternoon." You've got Alice looking beyond drowsy, almost like she's suffering the aftereffects of a party the night before, and she's surrounded by love hearts and you've drawn a bottle near her, nestled in the grass, that looks suspiciously like booze.
CRG: Yeah, she's definitely a substance abuser. But that was something I found interesting from the original illustrations, you can't really figure out how old she is, and in a lot of different illustrations of Alice over the years they've made her a little girl, they've made her older. In the animated Disney version she is more like 18, she's a lot older. I was kind of playing with that. In one version I had her older and a little more tarted up, a little sexier. But I didn't want to get into those issues.
NP: Sexualizing a children's story.
CRG: Yeah. I do have a lot of child fans. I thought there's going to be a lot of 7-year olds looking at this. I wanted to keep the drug and alcohol references in there because I thought it was important, but not [go] totally over-the-top. I made her kind of 12, on the verge of being an older person, but it comes down to 'Do you give her boobs or not?'
NP: She's got quite a puffy top on her dress so you can't really tell.
CRG: Yeah, 'cause when I was drawing that I thought, 'Would she have cleavage?' Not really. That was the ultimate problem; would she have boobs or not? But she's definitely drinking, so I guess she's like a 12-year old boozer.
NP: It is the interesting dichotomy with Carroll's story. On the surface it's a fairytale for children, but it works on another level as a drug-fueled nightmare for adults. And the perception of the story changes as you grow. Do you remember the time when you saw it through more innocent eyes? And how did your perception change?
CRG: I do remember. I remember reading the story and looking at the original illustrations, and it was one perception, like, "This is weird." I loved the rabbit from a very child-like perspective. Then being a teenager and listening to a lot of music and taking mushrooms and doing all this stuff, and also going to Disneyland, they have a whole Alice in Wonderland ride, there's all these layered references from my druggy teen years. Also realizing how many bands and other people are referencing the darker stuff.
But only upon when I took this project on, and re-read this story again, very intimately, trying to find more visual clues, [did I] realize really how dark it is. It's like a really bad trip. The Queen threatens to behead her at one pint, and they're drugging her, really there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So from an adult perspective it kind of reminds me more of the old Germanic folk tales where the kids were always getting killed or ran off into the forest or actual bad things happened to them.
NP: In America, we tend to want to wrap our kids up in petal pink and powder blue and tell them fluffy fairy tales, but in reality children's own tastes are far more macabre, which I think is part of the appeal of Alice. The reality of Alice's Wonderland is quite nightmarish, but kids will happily giggle as the queen shouts, "Off with their heads." But you never get to see the consequences. I always wondered about the resulting pile of decapitated bodies.
CRG: I feel like American culture in general is very much afraid to show children anything outside of a puppy/marshmallow SpongeBob world. But in the fairytales throughout history it was very important to teach people consequences. Oftentimes kids would die at the end or they'd get shoved in the oven, or they'd be beheaded or turned into a frog. There were always these much darker things happening and I feel like in the American versions of a lot of children's stories, that element is sanitized out.
And I think the time we're living in now, it's really important for kids to be aware of [the fact that] there a bad things in the world happening. There are things to be scared of, but that's how you grow and mature. You have to face your fears, so I wanted to keep some of that darkness in there...People underestimate kids a lot in terms of what they can handle. I know there are things that are appropriate and not, but I think American culture in particular is very sterilized when it comes to children's literature.
NP: But we also mollycoddle our adults. Take for example the gulf war and the policy of hiding the dead and the wounded from us. We don't see the consequences, the bodies of those we've killed. Nor do we see the bodies of our own troops.
CRG: I think again with American culture we're really infantilized. We're like an infantile culture that has an inability to deal with bad news, and that is prevalent across the board in America. Even talking about anything real, or showing somebody an image of something real that's happening in the world, people don't want to deal with it. They don't want to see it, they don't want to talk about it, and I think it's really kind of psychotic to not address everything that's actually happening in the world, to not even want to know about it.
NP: Yeah, I was watching a clip today of the cast of Jersey Shore being interviewed on a so-called news show.
CRG: Oooh, I was just looking at that and I was thinking I can't believe that this guy is somebody that has to be in my consciousness...
NP: That's all a part of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry in general being this Wonderland for the world that distracts us from the dark stuff that's going on that we should actually be paying attention to.
CRG: It seems too that the darker the world gets the more people really do have a need for that distraction. I mean Michael Jackson's death went on for three or four months on CNN to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. And that's just not very balanced.
NP: I know you grew up not far from Disneyland, which itself has many parallels to Carroll's story. On the surface it's this world famous wonderland, but the flipside is, if you grew up near it, it just became this place for bored local kids to go and get fucked up on drugs.
CRG: It was really the best place to take acid. And the contrast here I think is this idea of suburbia as the safest place, the happiest place. That's the thing to achieve in Western culture, Disneyland being at the pinnacle, the cherry on top of the happiest, best, safest place to be. When, in reality, to have a world that is paved over in concrete with all indigenous plants and animals removed and replaced by fake plants and animals, that's not something the world should strive towards as a collective goal. So there definitely are two sides to that.
NP: Throughout your various books, collections and exhibitions (The Saddest Place On Earth, Tragic Kingdom, etc.), your work has very much been influenced by growing up in the shadow of Disneyland. And it seems to have had a profound effect on a whole generation of kids from Orange County. How did the OC, this perfect vision of 1950's suburbia, become such a Tragic Kingdom?
CRG: For a longtime I had real strong ideas about relationships between suburbia and fascism, having this ber perfect goal to be cleansed of anything strange or different. There's a real xenophobia in Orange County that's very dark.
NP: But then you look at Disney movies, it's taken until 2010 for them to release a movie starring a black princess.
CRG: The image of perfection in fantasy and fairytales is it completely removed of multicultural things. In the '70s we had Sesame Street that was trying to introduce that, but I think for the most part, especially in Disney and Southern California and the white middle class, their idea of perfection didn't involve any other cultures. Disney did travel to other cultures, but you can see how we sort of worship Germanic castles and all these European influences.
NP: And if you look at most of the set-in-suburbia dramas and soap operas on TV, they set up very unreal expectations. For example in Desperate Housewives, Mike Delfino is a plumber yet he lives in this gorgeous, million dollar plus suburban home. Kids have grown up with this promise of what suburban life should afford that they have no way of attaining for themselves.
CRG: Yes, and it's already crumbling because their parents are now in foreclosure and can't afford those houses. It's kind of like the collective fantasy of suburbia. It's not real. It's not working. This faade is falling apart. These kids that have grown up in those cultures aren't prepared at all for what's coming, for fighting over resources globally and global economic collapse. They're just not prepared at all for any of that.
NP: Talking of the American fairytale that's come crashing down, I was reading an interview you did that was first published on Sept 16, 2006 on a website called Crown Dozen where you very specifically predicted the global economic crash:
CRG: Well I had a lot of other people I was reading that were talking about it long before it happened. All these bankers, now the big lie is "Oh, we didn't know." They knew. It was written about extensively. They knew exactly what was happening and they knew how they were going to get their money out. It just becomes part of the collective lie. That's the thing, I think American culture is just a series of collective lies presented to us.
NP: I agree. When people were signing these mortgages that they never had any prospect of being able to afford, they were signing on the back of a fairytale. They were sold a fairytale.
CRG: Yeah, and along with the mortgage you get the anti-depressant drugs. It kind of reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick stories where the characters, they're taking these drugs because they're living on Mars and they want to pretend they're living on earth. It's like you need the drug to continue the fantasy of the lie. You can't have the lie without the anti-depressants.
NP: I guess that's what you explored in your 2008 Ambien Somnambulants show.
CRG: Yeah, exactly. The sleepwalking. Interestingly, going back to Alice, I found it actually really amazing when I thought about it, why there are so few female heroes in literature and children's literature - especially of that time period. Here was this young girl that had an opinion, had her ideas about things, and wasn't being railroaded over by adults or anyone in the story. I hadn't really though about that before. And that's really an interesting perspective. I bet it didn't come out of that period very often. Young girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, and not have opinions.
NP: That's part of Alice's charm, she doesn't say what's she expected to say. The big end is that she stands up to the kangaroo court and tells her elders and those in authority that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards."
CRG: Yeah, and flips them over, creates anarchy and runs off.
NP: The saddest thing about that ending for me is that that play on words is lost because most people today don't realize that "card" back then was another word for "joker" or "fool."
CRG: Yes, the puns are very specific, and a lot of them are English specific. Like I didn't know what "whiting" was, that it was also a fish. Certain things are very English and from the Victorian era. Upon re-reading it closer it was like, "Oh, OK! I never got that part." Re-reading it very closely was a joy, to think about it on a deeper level, of all those other themes going on.
NP: Children are taught to blindly respect authority, and the great thing about Alice is that she doesn't. We need to encourage that more. Going back to your Ambien Somnambulants idea that many of us sleepwalk through life, I always consider apathy to be the greatest facilitator of evil.
CRG: Wow, yeah. Just doing nothing.
NP: But then kids are taught that as long as something is presented by someone in authority, you're not really supposed to challenge it.
CRG: Yeah. That's the thing, again going back to her challenging and being so opinionated, it kind of ties into the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s. All that, all of the bra-burning and now we're at this point where young people, they don't have a lot of role models still. Even if you're great singer you still have to be half naked. You have to have that thing too to be famous. That is the message.
NP: I guess if Mattel made Alice she would have impossibly large breasts.
CRG: She's have huge boobs, but she'd be 12. [laughs] It's like, non-threatening but hot. She would never be a '50s buxom kind of [female]. That's the other thing, thinking of the females of the '50s that were powerful but bigger, now there's this cult of petite, harmless females. It becomes very confusing when drawing boobs or not drawing boobs, 'cause the size of the boob in relation to the rest of the body is like an indicator of power.
NP: But is that indicative of physical power over mental power?
CRG: I don't know. I was just thinking about anytime I'm confronted with having to draw boobs or no boobs. It determines how old I'm making a character. It's always a very confusing issue because I don't want to make them too big, because that plays into this weird like Japanese manga fetishization of the boob. But then you make them too small and she's 10 or 12, and it gets into the weird pedophile grey area. So I never know what to do with the boobs when I'm drawing them.
NP: It's kind of sad that that was your biggest issue when drawing Alice.
CRG: Yeah, because it's like, should she be older? But then it's totally wrong to have her too sexy. It was distracting. Her character in the story is mentally powerful and mentally challenging. I mean, I wanted to make her interesting, but sexy is sort of a one-note thing.
NP: But then that plays into the stereotype that you can't be blonde with big boobs and have intellectually powerful arguments.
CRG: Yeah, that you can't have both. It's a conundrum right? But then she can't be ugly right? You can't have an ugly little girl, that's totally not allowed. It's funny, just drawing these things and amending them, and thinking about all these visual clues.
NP: Obviously LA and the OC has provided a massive amount of inspiration for your work, but now you live in the middle of the woods not far from Oregon. What effects have your new surroundings had on your work?
CRG: I was born and raised in LA, and I don't it's a great idea to live all your life in one place. I think it's good to scare yourself, and, if you have the means, to try out new situations. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to live in nature - like really in it - and not be surrounded by convenience all the time.
The area we live in, it's really beautiful. It's within the boundaries of National Forest and National Park, so it is a preserved area. That's really inspiring because there's intact eco-systems and giant redwood trees, all these things that just seem other-worldly. In a way it makes me sad because I feel that there's not many of these places left anymore. We've destroyed a lot of them...I don't know how much longer we're going to last here in society, and I want to be able to live in this before it gets destroyed.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. An exhibition of original art from the book will be held at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens on March 6th with a special book release party. Garcia will subsequently embark on a West Coast book signing tour. Go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/ for further details.