Kristan Marvell

Museum as Retail Space (MaRS) is pleased to present The Quiddity of Presence by Kristan Marvell, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition shows monumental sculpture and amalgam light wall reliefs.

Exhibition Text by Robert Zin Stark:

We must un-educate ourselves and look back towards the shadow.

The alchemy of image making is in the shadow.

The primeval simulacrum of reality is the shadow.

Marvell’s sculptures are resultant of a dancelike act finessing large bowed hot-wires, fluidly slicing monolithic blocks of styrofoam evoking stalagmites or eruptions of flame. Geological fragments to momentary flares, his forms capture our horizons of time.

Shifting frequencies of light are projected across works casting inverse complementary shadows, multiplying their composition and presence. Other works are coated with combinations of resin, paint, or graphite to control their dynamic with light. The invisible and ephemeral quality of light is weighed against the presence of mass.

Marvell further conflates shadow and form with a projection of fluctuating composite wavelengths over an energetic relief. The absence of mass leaves us only with an image of shadows, the prime simulacrums with transformative power to return us to reality.

Kristan Marvell lives and works in Los Angeles. Kristan Marvell’s sculptures derive from a technique, which he developed and has worked with over the last twenty years, that he calls spontaneous carving. His bronze sculptures begin as monolithic chunks of Styrofoam. As a stone carver has marble, Marvell has Styrofoam. The sculptures evolve as Marvell pulls and manipulates large hot wires through massive blocks of Styrofoam. This process allows for the improvisational removal of material and produces a unique visual vocabulary. Also, Styrofoam, a material devoid of sensuality, an industrial emblem, is in a sense corrected and made sensual as it progresses towards its transformation into bronze.

Through this visual vocabulary Marvell explores the confrontation between the natural, the organic, and man’s manipulation and reconstruction of the world.