Mariah Garnett’s newest film, Life and Taxes, opens with a confession that is all too common. As a gentle elderly man in thick black frames, Sebastian, shuffles through what are supposedly the cameraperson’s tax documents, a voice behind the camera announces: “Most of my income was W-2. And I’m missing two 1099s.” This moment of self-reproach, one that will resonate with anyone familiar with the US's notoriously analog tax system, is then juxtaposed with a soft pan of the accountant’s desk that perhaps more accurately reveals his true self than his chosen profession. Sprinkled among heaps of paper, which are presumably documents for his clients, are indicators that give away his eccentricities. Plastered on the desk are stickers endorsing Elizabeth Warren and Greenpeace, on top of which playbills and miniature figurines are stacked haphazardly. Against the cameraperson hesitantly announcing that she “should have more than” what is listed as her 1099 income, the camera dwells on a sign that juxtaposes an old Uncle Sam with Ronald Reagan’s infamous quip (“a taxpayer is a person who does not have to pass a civil service examination to work for the government.”). Sebastian is not your everyday accountant.

In the following sequence, slow, still shots of his charming and humble home, whose door is also splattered with stickers that reveal his political leanings just like his desk (“WAR IS OVER” or “I like it WILD”), unfold against a candid interview between Sebastian and the cameraperson. We learn that 75% of his clients are artists, and he has observed over the years that perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t “pay much attention to the business side of their careers.” In the eyes of the IRS, he adds, the “work” of an artist may not be all that different from a hobby, as it is a venture that continues to generate “losses” year after year. His words suggest that for some people, the world of hard numbers will never fully account for what matters most. And yet the same seems to hold true for him personally: rather than advise wealthier clients whose accounts would be far more lucrative, he chose to stay with people whose 1099s go missing instead. In the world of hard numbers, his would hardly qualify as the savviest decision either.

We understand, a few moments later, that the reason why he stayed with artists was because he, too, is one. A 90-year-old gay man, Sebastian moved to New York to become a writer in 1961 but decided to moonlight in accounting by day for a more stable career. He never gave up on his “creative side” though, he confides. In the coming sequences, he recalls the screenings, plays, and performances called The Nocturnal Dream Shows he had put together with his friends at the Palace Theater in San Francisco throughout the 1960s, some of which were so popular that the Fire Department came by to dissolve the crowd. As is the case with any creative endeavor, there have been ups and downs: some shows needed to be closed only after four days because they weren’t selling enough tickets, and in one instance, he needed to fire his then-boyfriend because he was showing up too drunk on sets. He nevertheless persisted, because his creative endeavors were a profound source of joy. Like a hobby, his creative life needed no justification beyond the pleasure it gave him.

The final parts of Life and Taxes are dedicated to recalling the legacy of Tricia’s Wedding (1971), a satirical film that he made on the occasion of Patricia Nixon’s wedding to Edward Cox. The film, which features members of the experimental theater group the Cockettes that Sebastian frequently collaborated with, serves as a queer equivalent to a historic outdoor ceremony held in the Rose Garden of the White House. During the reception, a drag Eartha Kitt pours a bottle of liquid—conveniently labeled “LSD”—into the punch, which results in a raucous, chaotic orgy that evokes the psychedelia in Jack Smith’s films. Fifty-five years later, Garnett helps Sebastian revisit the years when he was a “wellspring of energy,” but what Sebastian stages this time is a speculative funeral of Tricia Nixon that ties the knots in pure debauchery. The narrative that he has concocted for this fictitious Tricia makes the original wedding appear tame: her father’s life was cut short when he fell at a falafel factory in an unfortunate instance of “hummus-cide,” and Tricia, who became a “lunch-meat-purist-activist” following her father’s death, later falls for Nancy Reagan to become the “first celebrity lesbians.” If there is something the administrative language of taxation cannot capture, Sebastian’s outlandish dreams suggest, it is the stubborn human desire to make something strange and joyful out of whatever is at hand. In a world that seeks to transform the slightest creative impulse into capital, Life and Taxes thus offers a quiet and refreshing corrective.

Mariah Garnett (b. 1980, Portland; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2011) and a BA from Brown University (2003). Garnett is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe (2025); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2022); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2016); Buenos Tiempos Int., Brussels (2014); 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco (2013); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2010). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York (2026); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2026); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2024); Fierman Gallery, New York (2019); Magic Hour, Joshua Tree (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Vamiali, Athens (2017); Goldsmiths, London (2017); National Broadcast Ireland (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland (2014); and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012). Garnett is a recipient of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2019), Macdowell Colony Fellowship (2017), Harpo Emerging Artist Grant (2017), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2016), Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2015), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014).

Garnett's work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (MAC3).