Mark/Build/Mark

August 3 - Sept 15, 2018

Featured Artists: Lucas Thomas, Julio Alejandro, Dalton Frizzell, Jillian FitzMaurice, Derek Blancey, Drew Austin, Thomas Scharfenberg

Repeat mark/build/mark over and over again like a mantra until the words feel like marbles in your mouth. Spit those marbles out and see what you’ve got. Mark-making remains distinct on one side while building occupies the other. In addition to these, one will find an unexpected gradient, revealing a latent family tie between the processes. 

For example, the stuff that is paint is also, after all, a blobby, very physical substance. Latent within paint is the capacity to disappear, to surrender physicality to representation. Also latent within paint is the capacity to assert physicality, to stand out as paint at the expense of illusion. Mark-making has its own gradient between the poles of illusion (image) and substance (object).

For its own part, sculpture does have an image quality, as some approaches to sculptural composition call for, just as in illusionistic painting, an ideal position from which the composed image of the sculpture can be viewed. The gradient here is between one position (image) and in-the-round (object).

What seems to be really so different between mark-making and object-building is the manner in which the specific medium employed effects a result. True, medium is suggestive, but insofar as every medium has a degree of flexibility, the artist retains the capacity to push into the unexpected. There is a creative tension between the medium and the intention of the artist. The most basic grammar of the artist, the variations and ambiguities of that grammar, is implicit in the medium, and is suggestive of something common to mark-making and object-building.

This is an exhibition that celebrates that which is shared, the common ancestor, and all the potential evolutions thereof.