Friday, January 8, 2016 to Friday, February 12, 2016
Forest City Gallery is pleased to present, Set On Stone, an exhibition by Mark Dudiak (Montreal, QC).
Opening Reception: Friday, January 8th, from 7 - 10 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, January 9th, from 1:30 - 2:30 PM
About the exhibition: Set on Stone explores the inter-relationship of subjectivity, absence and (im)mortality through the juxtaposition of graffiti and funerary portraiture. Consisting of wall paintings derived from Dudiak's Dead End project (MOCCA Toronto courtyard commission, Autumn 2012) and recent photographs of tombstones from across Europe and North America. Memorials and graffiti both rely on personal context to describe individuals who are both anonymous and absent, Set On Stone asks if any trace of individuality can survive when images inevitably lose personal context.
Stenciled wall-paintings rendered in light greys and white (evocative of marble, granite or concrete slabs) first used to realize Dead End at MOCCA Toronto in 2012, were assembled from hundreds of images of graffiti collected from locations across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Consisting only of images of faces, this work explores individuality and dissent in a modern urbanized milieu by contrasting the transgressive public declarations of graffiti with a sequential and arbitrary production system. The photographic portraits in this exhibition are not of people per-se but of the pictures that, they, or their family chose to represent them in perpetuity. Taken together, all of these images articulate a subjective absence that permeates the built environment and highlight tensions between image, memory and presence.
About the artist:
Mark Dudiak (b.1979 lives and works in Montreal). Mark Dudiak is a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, installation, photography and video. His work is concerned with ideas of public space and collective memory. He is currently an MFA candidate and the J.W. McConnell Memorial Fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. Dudiak has presented his work widely across Canada and was recently an artist in residence at the Centre for Art and Urbanism (ZK/U) in Berlin, Germany.