ILL MEET YOU IN THE MIDDLE

BLACKARTPROJECTS & MARK WHALEN PRESENT

I’LL MEET YOU

IN THE

MIDDLE

B L A C K

I’LL MEET YOU IN THE MIDDLE Future Perfect Gillman Barracks 47 Malan Road #01-22 Singapore 109444 11 - 15 December, 2013

THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS In the glossary of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe – a book which both revolutionized and popularized physical science, capturing the imaginations of literary and visual artists as much as quantum theory had a generation earlier – a dimension is described as “an independent axis or direction in space or spacetime. The familiar space around us has three dimensions, and the familiar spacetime has four. Superstring Theory requires the universe to have additional spatial dimensions.” String Theory is a mixologized unification strategy, the holy grail of scientific pursuits – a single idea that accounts for all known forces and forms of matter within a cohesive framework. The bad news is that universe is bigger, or at least more complex, than people, even scientists, can ever hope to render. The good news is, that need not stop human beings from exploring it. It stands to reason this kind of aspirational thinking would resonate with artists, musicians, poets, philosophers, and spiritualists, as great advancements in science, technology, and mathematics tend to do. As it turns out, Aussie turned graphic artist turned graffiti writer and muralist turned atelier painter Mark Whalen is that kind of thinker, too.

“Human Development” sounds like some kind of Sci-Fi Social Studies. In fact, that’s not too far off the mark. If the universe has more aspects than meet the eye – and that’s not even counting the imaginary or metaphorical, just the real but invisible – then depicting that vast sea of intimate details might be a daunting proposition.

But by viewing his artistic enterprise as a perennial study of the human race, Whalen’s project has the potential to, eventually, get around to everything. Like String Theory, he just has to locate and map out the remaining dimensions of the universe. He’s starting with people. “Sexuality, invention, playing, fighting, experimenting, cultivating, dreaming, destroying, and ideologies controlling each other. All of this happening simultaneously. I’m looking at the full range of everyday experience.

It’s a broad narrative.”

This catalog of human activity requires a consistent iconography, with characters, patterns, and certain kinds of imagery repeating in various configurations across the series. This kind of cosmological structure is much more complex in its compositions and psychological nuances than most street art has the opportunity to be. And in the

end, Whalen had to make a choice between his street and gallery projects. He’s in the process of leaving his nom du rue Kill Pixie behind, and becoming Mark Whalen. Ultimately, his vision increasingly incorporated formal and material processes that necessitate a studio practice, not a street practice. “I got sick of being separated from my art. I studied graphics, then I worked in skate design, and got into street art. I used to be more involved in the graffiti side of things than I am now. I had this one art show in Sydney that went great. Then I had the Japan thing go down. That was very expensive. We had an art show as a benefit, and that did well too… There was no decision not to do it, but painting sort of took over. And I became obsessed with detail and surface, and with the grid, and other things I needed to work on in the studio, patiently.”

And that formalist redoubling has been paying off. Whalen has been availing himself of all kinds of dynamic, if not painterly, then paint-dependent, techniques. The introduction of clear varnish is a major step, producing color saturation and higher contrast in fine details, activating negative space, and creating a glistening, refracted light that keeps the eye skittering across his trademark gridded spaces, the better to

notice the balanced scattershot of figures and objects that occupy them. The paintings’ relatively small scale, visual opulence, deftly precise line-work, and the hand-wrought heft of the wood panels on which they’re painted combine to give each individual painting a seductive physical presence and aura of importance.

Seen together, the effect is not unlike the assembly of unearthed elements in an archaeological dig or newly discovered pictographic scroll – as though each scene were a clue to understanding more about the civilization being studied.

If a future and/or alien race looked to Whalen’s Human Development files for insight into Man, they’d encounter figures of ambiguous gender, some black, some white, striking postures of subjugation, frolic, ritual and more inexplicable behavior, all the while balancing on the tiniest little feet. “The figures represent general people, and have no real characteristics of either male or female. I use them as a study.”

The viewer is dependent upon body language for gender cues, presuming anything prompts them to wonder. Their cartoonishness reinforces the allegorical orientation of the set-pieces, the artist’s choice to avoid realism prompting in the viewer a search for a deeper level of meaning. And

I’ll meet you in the middle (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 120 x 135 cm

it’s obviously a choice, because he demonstrates the full range of his graphic and representational abilities elsewhere in his compositions – especially in rendering the array of things that furnish and define both the picture planes and the back-stories.

Around the spaces of his pictures, there are strewn, floating, and tethered a great many living things and dead things, casual things and ferocious things, things that are passionately coveted, and mundane functional things, fanciful unidentifiable things, and still more things both archetypal and abstract.

Where did all these things come from? Undoubtedly they have personal significance for the artist, but what is available to an audience of strangers? These things are neither randomly chosen nor casually placed, there is a narrative subtext.

The leaf if a Chinese emblem of happiness. Leaves often symbolize human lives, and mortality, as in autumn, and the passage of time.

Trees themselves have a lot of different meanings, and feature as the sites for various epiphanies of science and revelations of religion from Newton to the Buddha. Threads represent continuity in space and time, ancestry, destiny, great love, and

alliances. The globe is an emblem of power, authority, totality and universality, omniscience, earthly passions, desires, and fertility.

Masks are one of the most ubiquitous, easily read symbols in human culture. From religion to theatre to psychology, biology, and sociology. From Japanese No theatre to Picasso to Phantom of the Opera to Halloween, the meaning of masks are plentiful and plain.

Water is so many things, some more abstract than others. It may represent purity, fertility, life source, fluidity, dissolution of the material world, baptism, wisdom or prophecy. Of course, in agriculture, trade and ecology water is a real thing whose various dispositions have real consequences for the rise and fall of civilizations. There are occasional overtly religious references like prayer rugs and meditation chambers. These and other collective, atavistic memes likes books, cages and monumental phalluses, seem to hint at broader ideas about higher powers, or inner freedom, looking at the world’s biggest religions and enduring spiritual traditions as a body of information that helps explain the human condition. There is also the matter of humanity’s dysfunctional relationship to the natural world, something which

Whalen feels some urgency about, but presents as an ecological riddle, as Whalen is more than aware that the cautionary paradox or progress is that it both uplifts and destroys.

“The situations I explore have serious undertones, but I always treat them with humor. That’s just me anyway.” Case in point: the inspiration for his nowubiquitous, conceptually and optically fundamental grid system that has come to underlie all the work. “I was in jail in Tokyo for graffiti stuff, and the bathroom was this huge tiled room with overflowing water and naked people everywhere.” So naturally, he wanted to paint it. The grid functions in Whalen’s art as an allegorical as well as a literal armature, an emptiness he can fill, a platform for launching his ideas and a means for containing them. “I’m into scientific things, so I base it all in these sterile environments, like laboratories, where I can place scenarios. I arrange certain things around a story, a concept, then I start adding. And I never sketch, I problem solve as I go. I like to surprise myself, or else it would just be labor with no spontaneity.”

In the ancient world numbers had mystical qualities; and polygons, triangles, squares,

hexagons, and so forth, had even more impact than the numbers themselves, because they were visual. In Whalen’s art, math has meaning, too. “I like the idea of mathematics, and architecture.

But really what I needed was the spatial containment the grids and cubes give me. I needed to build a space that could be a setting,” but without the distraction of being any particular kind of place. “All the color in the work is attached to the narrative.

Deploying color is like solving a mapping problem.” In fact his studio, with its endless supply of adhesive tape, sharp knives, and single-hair brushes resembles nothing so much as a drafting studio. “Life is a series of rooms, and in here and out there are all of these interconnected states of being. There’s room for the viewer to project emotion and meaning onto the images. Peace or violence, hope or despair – it’s an open story.”

– Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles

Room of knowledge (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 120 x 90 cm

Hidden interiors (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 56 cm d

Opposit ends (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 37 x 51 cm

Black Diamond (Orange) (2013) acrylic and ink on canvas 100 x 100 cm

A problem solver (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 34 x 44 cm

The laws of four (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 32 cm d

Group message (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 23 cm d

Positive notes (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 23 cm d

Maker of things (11.04am) (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 21 x 13 cm

Maker of things (10.43pm) (2013) mixed media on resin coated board 21 x 13 cm

Future Perfect is a gallery and project platform based in Singapore, working with an international roster of contemporary artists.

47 Malan Road #01-22 Singapore 109444

“The Paradox of Progress” appears courtesy of ZERO+ Publishing and Shana Nys Dambrot.

First published in Mark Whalen: Human Development © ZERO+ Publishing First Edition 2011 “The Paradox of Progress” © 2011 Shana Nys Dambrot ISBN: 978-1-937222-00-0

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