Mark Manders: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Mark Manders. For his second solo show with the gallery, Manders will exhibit a series of major new works in both the ground floor and second floor galleries.
Manders' unique and multi-disciplinary practice encompasses installation, sculpture, drawing and projected imagery. These new works elaborate on Manders' expanding and ongoing conceptual project, which the artist describes as self-portraiture through architecture, or a "self portrait as a building." Inspired by his initial interest in writing and literature, Manders' first artistic investigation of the self utilized language and the written word to describe the artist's innermost perceptions and understandings of the world. However, upon feeling bound rather than liberated by language as a medium Manders became increasingly interested in the architectural structure of story-telling rather than specific content. This early realization resulted in his first sculptural investigations of form, meaning and narrative.
With unlikely juxtapositions of "clay" figures - rendered in epoxy- household furniture, architectural forms, and other miscellaneous objects, Manders creates poignant and mysterious tableaux that investigate philosophies of time, location, and biography. Challenging our preconceptions and transforming the spaces they inhabit, these intricate configurations of outwardly unrelated objects combine beautifully to turn the gallery into a landscape that evokes a psychological sense of otherness.
Installed as an architectural intervention within the entryway to the ground floor gallery, "Figure with Wooden Arm" is a double slide projection. As thirty altered versions of a single drawing dissolve in and out of each other we are confronted with two figures in a constantly shifting, though ultimately unchanging state. The drawing on which the piece is based is one of an ongoing series of "vanishing point drawings." At each place within the drawing where a decision has been made - a mark is begun, ended, or changes direction - a single line is traced back to distant point of perspective. The culmination of the image and the means by which it is produced exists as an enigmatic two-sided projection of worlds both real and imagined and acts as a revealing introduction to Manders' vision.
All installation images above: Photo by Jean Vong
