Mark Lewis at Daniel Faria Gallery

Artist: Mark Lewis

Exhibition title: The End

Venue: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Date: December 14, 2022 – March 4, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present The End, Mark Lewis’ fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. This exhibition will take place in two parts: from December 14th to February 4th From Casa do Povo to Art Palacio (2019) and On Bay Street (2022) will be on view, with Standing Ovation (2019) and Death (2022) on view for the remainder of the exhibition through March 4th.

The four films included in this exhibition take place in what may best be described as the process or state of ending—a verb, rather than a noun.

On Bay Street features a lone white balloon drifting back and forth across a busy street in Toronto. Suspension builds as cars narrowly miss it and indifferent pedestrians pass by. Bits of dirt collect on its surface. The scene is both tender and melancholic, this abandoned relic of human activity out of place against the cold grey sidewalks and buildings of downtown.

In From Casa do Povo to Art Palacio thousands of still images are used to render a three-dimensional space through which a camera can wander, tracing the route between two modernist landmarks in present-day downtown São Paulo. This transition from two-dimensional images to three-dimensional world is full of glitches and gaps, the resulting scene resembling a hollow city. The facades of buildings and streets float in a black field of digital space, and orbs of indistinguishable visual information float past the camera like blimps in the sky. Termed “the city of the future” in the 1950s, São Paulo was one of the fastest growing cities in the world. In Lewis’ film, São Paulo is catapulted into the even-more-distant future of the digital age—a city at the end of the world—while its architecture remains rooted in the past, degenerated relics from that modernist era of progress and development.

The work culminates with the camera’s arrival at the Art Palacio, its exterior lights beckoning us, the viewer, into an abandoned interior. The once grand and bustling cinema has since undergone a transformation not uncommon for such cultural establishments: from multiplex to adult movie theatre to sex club; the empty building bears the marks of all these habitations on its graffitied walls. We move through what was originally the theatre, its bright orange and red walls a reminder of the missing plush seats and permeating scent of popcorn, and then in one swift movement, we pierce through the now-absent cinema screen to the other side.

Shot on Lake Suffern in Saskatchewan, Standing Ovation consists of a single, static shot. A single hockey player jockeys a puck around a small, perfectly circular skating rink in the middle of an otherwise barren winter landscape. Snow pelts down. Suddenly, almost zombie-like, a crowd materializes and walks out of the forest, assembling around the rink to applaud her. This scene recalls an infamous moment in Canadian ice hockey history, when on February 5, 1980, during his final season, Gordie Howe stepped out on the ice in Detroit and was met with a four-minute standing ovation from 21,000 fans. This exchange between the individual and the crowd is both intimate and uncanny. The audience members in Standing Ovation seem to have no purpose beyond their supply of unending applause, with which they hold both time and reality in suspension.

In Death the camera pans across the dozens of press tents set up outside of Buckingham Palace in the days following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The seriality of one white tent after the next is matched by the heavily manicured red and purple flowers and British flags, hanging at half-mast, that appear in the foreground. Each tent contains the same sense of anticipation—various people in suits pace, wait, or sit. Delivery people walk by. Their purple shirts match the purple flowers. Everything is repetitive and ordered, until the camera picks up speed and pans beyond the gates, revealing a frenzied crowd. Some people are waiting, unsure of what to do, and others walk by quickly without stopping, on their way elsewhere. In a brief, final moment we see the scene mirrored back at us in the screen of a woman’s phone. She takes a selfie.

There is an echo of the camera moving through the cinema screen at the Art Palacio in the final shot of the phone screen in Death, both engaging in different ways with the history and future of the moving image. From Casa do Povo to Art Palacio doesn’t so much as mourn the end of cinema, as it acts as a monument to the end: of cinema, of modernism, perhaps of film itself. We are left applauding.

Mark Lewis was born in Hamilton, Ontario and currently lives and works in London, U.K. Lewis attended Harrow College of Art in London and the Polytechnic of Central London, and began his career as a photographer before moving into film. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world such as MASP, São Paulo (2020); Casa do Povo, São Paulo (2019); The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2017); The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2017); Canada House, London (2015); The Power Plant, Toronto (2015); The Louvre, Paris (2014); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2013); Vancouver Art Gallery (2007); BFI Southbank, London (2007) and Musée d’art Contemporain, Montéal (2007). In 2009, Lewis represented Canada in the 53rd Venice Biennale, curated by Barbara Fischer.

From Casa do Povo to Art Palacio was commissioned by Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil) and curated by Benjamin Seroussi with the support of the British Council and Central Saint Martins.

The production of Standing Ovation and Death was generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts.