Robert Marshall at Baxter Street Camera Club of New York
Image above: Robert Marshall, Untitled 1, 2015, Latex ink on silver vinyl, mounted on Dibond / Courtesy of BAXTER ST at CCNY
BAXTER ST at CCNY is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent work by Robert Marshall, organized by guest curator J Pasila. Marshall photographs the world seen in passing, through car and train windows. Employing latex ink, he transfers these fugitive images – often desolate, post-industrial city and suburbscapes – onto silver vinyl. The resulting images, functioning both as windows and mirrors, become zones of luminous ambiguity. As the viewer moves a few inches in any direction, what she sees changes. Small shifts of light as well as the changing gallery environment become part of the picture. Marshall views perception as relational; his evanescent images, in which actual and depicted light intermingle, enact this proposition.
Image above: ©Robert Marshall, Car Window 3, 2015, Latex ink on silver vinyl, mounted on Dibond / Courtesy of BAXTER ST at CCNY
The world Marshall depicts, writes Lilly Wei in a catalog accompanying the exhibition, “dissolves, reflection upon reflection, into something more uncertain, mysterious and inaccessible. They’re rife with inexplicable, perhaps accidental anomalies that skew the narrative. In looking at his work, you might ask: is that stray mark a cloud caught by the camera? Or is it a residue of the process, a rebellious smudge of ink? And where did that bit of color come from?” Thus, writes Wei, “The entire construct becomes a visual conundrum.”
Image above: ©Robert Marshall, Curtain 1, 2015, UV curable ink on silver vinyl, mounted on Dibond / Courtesy of BAXTER ST at CCNY
Also included are a series of images printed on slightly altered found “texts”: old phone book pages, stock market reports, personal ads. In these pieces, contrasting means of representation overlap and intertwine. They’re often impossible to separate. Marshall, writes critic Jo-ey Tang, incites us “to lift our customary perceptual veils … these are deeply psychic spaces.” In the works on paper, the inadequate descriptive systems merge to create poetic images which are infused with subtle uncertainty. So too in the artist’s delicate prints of curtains on mulberry paper, in which, once again, object and means of depiction merge.
Image above: ©Robert Marshall, Office Building 7, 2015, Latex on silver vinyl, mounted on Dibond / Courtesy of BAXTER ST at CCNY
Robert Marshall’s drawings, paintings and photographs have been exhibited at White Columns, The Drawing Center, Art In General, the Thread Waxing Space, Richard Anderson Fine Arts, Caren Golden Gallery, Derek Eller Gallery, Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, Wessel O’Connor Gallery, Steffany Martz Gallery, as well as at numerous other venues in the United States, Europe and Latin America. A writer as well as a visual artist, his novel A Separate Reality was published in 2006 by Carroll & Graf. His fiction, non-fiction, criticism and translations have appeared in Salon, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, Eclectica, Public Books, Artnet, Event, Blue Lake Review, Ducts, Ping Pong Journal, Coe Review and other publications. He lives and works in New York City. His web site is www.robertmarshall.net.
Image above: ©Robert Marshall, Rear View, 2015, Latex ink on silver vinyl, mounted on Dibond / Courtesy of BAXTER ST at CCNY
J Pasila is a photo-based artist and curator. She has participated in the “dust” photogram collective in Paris and her work has been shown at Momenta Art, Carriage Trade and Plane Space galleries in NYC. J has received grants and awards from the Elizabeth Foundation, the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, and the Mustarinda Association in Finland. She has twice been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and attended the Herhusid and Skaftfell residencies in Iceland. She divides her time between northern Iceland and Brooklyn.
This exhibition is part of a series of guest-curated exhibitions at BAXTER ST at CCNY resulting from an open call for proposals, and is made possible in part by generous support from public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
