Mario Marzan

The Constructed Landscape @ NURTUREart in Brooklyn, Jan 7th- Feb 19th, 2011

January 07, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, January 7, 7-9pm, press preview at 6pm.

Curated by Lia Rose Newman

Featuring Artists: Saul Becker, Tim Kiernan, Mike Lavine, Greg Lindquist, Mario Marzan, Jason Mitcham, and Alison Overton.

For the first exhibition in 2011, NURTUREart Non-Profit is pleased to present a show focused on the contemplations of our built environments. This group of artists are all working with landscapes, but not in the traditional sense. Rather than looking to reflect in the spiritual beauty of nature, the artists of The Constructed Landscape are concerned with the impact of an ever developing industrial landscape – a more common sight nowadays. They are interested in a different type of nature: a specifically human instinct to expand and progress our built environments. Each artist is actively challenging landscape as a genre, presenting unique vignettes, based on actual experiences on and within the land around them. Combining natural and fabricated elements, these artists draw our attention to the construction of all the landscapes we inhabit.

Review in ART PAPERS, Nov/Dec Issue

December 04, 2010

Check out Laurel Fredrickson’s review of the exhibition Necessary Fictions, organized by myself and John Ribó in the Nov/Dec issue of ART PAPERS.

There is not an online version of the review, but you can read a scanned version here.

ARTiculating Caribbean Imaginaries – Oct 21–Dec 3, 2010

October 08, 2010

ARTiculating Caribbean Imaginaries: Four Caribbean Artists

John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

Christopher Cozier | Mario Marzan | Fausto Ortiz | Gelsy Verna
Curated by Michaeline Crichlow

Opening Reception: Thursday October 21, 4:30 PM
Dialogue With Exhibition Artist Fausto Ortiz: Friday October 22, 3:30 PM

The Caribbean artists here articulate a visual poetics about their places in the world, and the world in their spaces. They engage in a visual reading of their experiences of place from various locations, within the region and without. The work of artists, Gelsy Verna, Haitian-Canadian, who 2 years ago, left us prematurely, Trinidadian, Christopher Cozier, Puerto Rican, Mario Marzan and Fausto Ortiz of La Republica Dominicana engage particular tropes common to the region’s socio-cultural practices, its imaginations and its dire ecological and geo-political contexts . These heterogeneous expressions share a common sensibility which is expressed, or so it seems, as a prominent statement about liminal movements- a dwelling in movement- and shape-shifting identities that disclose agonistic existences with things as they are, or have become in an era of entanglement and vulnerability. Caribbean homes are vulnerable spaces. Homes may offer comfort, but in the face of the region’s terrors- hurricanes, earthquakes, natural or sociopolitical disasters, (sometimes occurring simultaneously) and domestic violences-they offer no such guarantees of place. If the Caribbean is a ‘location of unending journeys,’ as Cozier suggests, then these articulations map the routes of the region’s paradoxical imaginaries. They provide a way to locate something that seems always elusive and incoherent. Like creolization itself these imaginaries lend expression to a Caribbeanness in motion, in tension and often in violent articulations.

Curator Michaeline Crichlow is Associate Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Duke University .

* Images: Gelsy Verna, Mississippi Goddamn, c. 1996, Mixed Media on Paper / Mario Marzan, Islands in the Stream, c.2010, Mixed Media on Panel

Mapping Memory at Artspace, Sept. 17th – Oct. 30th

September 29, 2010

This exhibition features the work of Darren Goins, Mario Marzan, Renee Van der Stelt, and Rosemary Winn, and explores the use of mapping as a way of assessing, depicting, and charting the world around us. Employing a diverse array of media and techniques including constructed photographs, sculptural/video installation, printmaking, digital images, collage, and cut paper, each artist visualizes or “maps” memory in a unique way.

Exhibition Dates: September 18 – October 30, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday October 1, 2010

Location: Artspace, Gallery 2, 201 E. Davie St., Raleigh, North Carolina 27601

Curated by: Lia Newman

Phone: (919) 821.2787
Email: info@artspacenc.org

HOURS
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