Artists: Marc Matchak & Isabelle Frances McGuire
Exhibition title: Dedicated to Those Who Continue to Dwell in Lightless Descent
Venue: King’s Leap, New York, US
Date: July 30 – September 12, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and King’s Leap, New York
“Dedicated to those who continue to dwell in the lightless descent,” is inscribed on the inside of The Essence of Eternity’s Despair, a cassette released by Portuguese black metal outfit Sanguine Relic in 2018. This inscription is a paean to purveyors of black metal, who accept darkness as a unifying aesthetic conceit, a rejection of light as a form of salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition but also as it serves to organize work, leisure time, and the material of all things.
The artworks in this exhibition extract the quality of appearances fleeting from their material properties into the realm of the individual conscious. Human and animal depictions acquiesce to hybrid states bound by the fabric of self-reflection and perceived judgment. Sculptures retain their fugue animism as models for the depressed person or overworked drunk. Gouache paintings of astral bodies present a future-in-real-time for the medium, where the formal and symbolic functions of reproduced compositions serve to populate an unending plateau of comprehensive mark-making.
The objects in this show reflect how we conceptualized our lives and futures during a time of intense public outcry and confusion, but also day in day out mundanity. We kind of wanted to make a show exploring nothing, because nothing was very exciting about life over the course of the past year, but we still had to work.
Marc Matchak (b. 1993) is an artist living and working in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Cheese and The Worms at Studio 640 (curated by Trevor Shimizu). Recent group exhibitions include Speaking Esperanto at Triest (Brooklyn, NY), Goldie’s Gallery at Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich, DE), PLO:III: Bar Art by Sinkhole Project at Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY).
Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994) is a Chicago-based artist. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Dresses Without Women with Bailey Connelly at Mickey Gallery (Chicago, IL), Snafu, Shitshow, Clusterfuck with Tim Mann at Julius Caesar (Chicago, IL), and P**** B**** Arena, curated by Good Weather and exhibited at Et al. (San Francisco, CA). McGuire is one-half of the band Chicago Artist Club, with artist Kira Scerbin.
