Mark Manders, Writing Skiapod (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
Taking over the Los Angeles outpost of Tanya Bonakdar, artist Mark Manders marks his fifth solo show with the gallery, and his first in LA since 2010. Continuing his exploration of rooms as a container for expressive and surreal arrangements of material, the artist here takes on a range of explorations of language and expression.
Throughout his decades long practice, Mark Manders has created an expanding but timeless architectural space whose arrangement is constantly being rebuilt and transformed. Rooms are populated and reimagined in an ongoing project that extends beyond the artist’s own subjectivity of the present moment. This imagined framework, wherein all of the artist’s sculptures and installations belong, has a non-linear narrative where contradictions co-exist: the ancient and the future, the temporary and the permanent, the beautiful and the grotesque, reality and fantasy. Long interested in language and the written word, each object Manders conceives of can be thought of as words in dialogue, forming abstract sentences. Similar to the words in a dictionary, they are linked together in one moment, frozen in time. Manders gives physical form to a dreamlike psychological space where each object is rendered with subtle alteration of scale and material.
Mark Manders, Writing Skiapod (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
The concept of “painting,” serves as a foundational thread in this exhibition, using the linguistic and conceptual expectations of the word to create new spaces for rupture and deconstruction. In Composition with Two Painted Heads and Composition with Painted Head, the portrait bust reemerges among Manders’ essential archetypal forms, but here the object is presented as canvas. In Painted Head a head is sandwiched between vertical elements that upon closer inspection are revealed as small stretched canvases. Juxtapositions of objects and materials inherent to an artist’s studio are employed in a way that subverts the traditional definition of media, or crosses genres, presenting objects that exist simultaneously as painting, poem, sculpture, and text.
Mark Manders, Writing Skiapod (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
Mark Manders, Writing Skiapod (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
A surreal and immersive installation entitled, Room with All Existing Words, is also on view, giving form to a mythical narrative built from artifacts and source material of intentionally questionable authenticity. In this installation, Manders has constructed an entire narrative and history around the word ‘skiapod’ (Greek for ‘shadow foot’), an ancient creature who uses its giant foot to shelter from the sun. Fascinated by the fact that people once believed these creatures existed, Manders explores the intricacies of the human mind and how it is capable of inventing such fantasies. When entering the room, Manders entire set of Notional Newspapers hangs from the ceiling. Riddled with historical context on the skiapod, the information presented is so well documented it leaves the viewer to question what is true and what is fantasy. Starting with the few known images of this mysterious creature, Manders created numerous references and art historical links to the mythological figure. By creating this fictional narrative and weaving it into threads of reality, the artists shows how our minds adapt to misleading information.
The artist here takes on language as a container and a tool, able to be manipulated and used as a concrete carrier of meaning simultaneously.
The show closes April 8th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Mark Manders:Â Writing Skiapod [Tanya Bonakdar]
