Ian Markell

Ian Markell deploys detournements and redirections in which the life of an image becomes an allegory, orbiting around the contained notions of the body and the archive. Carrying traces of the contexts they are sourced from, his images and forms often situate humanized gestures with the opposing infrastructural systems by which they are contained, transmitting an alternate view of the history of the present.

For Markell’s first solo show in New York and at Kimberly-Klark Gallery, the artist presents a large scale work, which generates the title of the show. In Names from the Box, a forest green canvas is stretched onto a vestibule that mimics the protective antechambers that pop up around boutiques, businesses and restaurants in the winter. Seamed to the green fabric are yellow canvas panels of photographed masculinity–images that exude secrecy as much as eroticism, obscured with residual markings that suggest a removal from context. Markell encountered the images in a queer archive, recaptured them on a light table, and in so doing, revealed traces of past lives silhouetted with glue marks from albums diluted into archival anonymity. In the artist’s resulting prints on canvas, the bonding agent that once invisibly affixed two surfaces becomes the protagonist of the work, carrying fibrous traces of material history and testifying as witness to contextual transference. What is typically opaque is made permeable, and what was once an intimate and perhaps singular perspective has been refracted into the multitudes of history that invites you to connect dots. Markell frames a both borrowed and accidental symptomatic glue gesture as a point of interest, overlaying and superficially trapping the faint images of men behind them. The flyer for the exhibition also makes reference to his practice of collecting, filtering, and photographing, depicting two such of Markell’s source images in an archival binder sleeve.

A kiosk is partially visible from behind the vestibule, pronouncing a space of both commerce and concealment. The relationship between the kiosk and the canvas vestibule enacts a sensual and subversive critical practice that arises through looking–not as seeing, but as a desiring to be seen. Simultaneously denying entry and provoking access, the reconstituted facade teases our need to penetrate in order to understand, troubling our conception of knowledge by suspending the realm of possible actions to sheer acts of imagination–leakages from behind the mask. Incorporating commercial construction methods to mimic a venue that historically has been a hub for information and exchange, Markell’s sculptural and obscured kiosk becomes shell-like, as it remains shuttered albeit vacant. The works simultaneously enclose and break open, yearn and withhold, dispossess and locate.

An additional smaller wall work, Hedy, echoes the modular notions of containment and poetics of tribute seen in Names from the Box. At its center, an entropic cluster of silver stars is visible within a plastic document casing, affixed to an iteration of the same green canvas composing the vestibule. Making subtle reference to the commutability of the material filters through which Markell tempers his focal interest, this work utilizes the gesture of containment as a titration for considering the soul. What begins as a tribute to Hedy Lamarr, the late Austrian-American actress whose scientific research gave way to encrypted networking systems like wifi and guided missiles, evolves into a meditation on chance, drawing names from a hat, and constituent parts living a life (un)necessarily contained.

Ian Markell (b. 1991) lives in Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art from The Cooper Union, New York City, NY in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Nothing Now Anything Anytime at Bad Reputation in Los Angeles (2018), Image of A Stylish Servant at Born Nude in Chicago (2015.) Recent selected group exhibitions include Entre Nous, Bad Reputation (2017); No! I am no Singular Instrument, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2016); No Hope No Fear at the Swiss Institute Rome, organized by Taylor Macklin (2016); 9800,501 (c) (3) at Foundation in Los Angeles (2015).