Galerie Eli Kerr is pleased to present Working together, our second solo exhibition with German Canadian artist Marlon Kroll. In his work When you sang for me (conference I) Kroll packs a space into an object. The suitcase, comparable to a torso, meets the viewer at waist level, while one must bend to bring their eye to the work. What one sees could be the vaulted ceilings of an opera house, or the anatomy of a throat. This strange coordination of the body, and movement from exterior to interior modes drives us towards the encounter with Kroll’s work. Over the past few years he has established a distinct artistic vocabulary where through formal and relational analogy the body is mirrored with forms from the designed world. Previous drawings and sculptures materialize through looking for emotional and spiritual resonance with the built environment, where staircases could represent a spine, a radiator could be a ribcage, or an HVAC system part could stand in for a lung.
On the short wall in the gallery a large color pencil drawing on a bedsheet is revealed only once the viewer begins to navigate the room. Controlled short strokes of color populate space like vibrations in a graph recording. The work evokes a sort of schematic or top view in its compositional space. Similar to sheet music, forms overlap and repeat, doubling as if they are in motion.
In the center of the room two stacks of disk-like cylinders are connected by stretched nylon bands as they rotate in unison. One stack is motorized, helping to revolve the other. Titled Hard drive, the work continues Kroll’s sculptural language where he draws from the relationship between the body and machines. Kroll’s sculptures develop through an intuitive and iterative computer modelling process where he seeks to arrive at precise objects that he describes as “platonic solids”. Along this journey a set of influences begin to shape the work, including revolving doors, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the proportions of the artist’s own body, the metrics of heartbeats per minute, and rotations per minute. Moving at a constant and busy pace the work recalls a recording device, as the friction between nylon and the papered surface gives sounds of hovering, breathing and stretching.
What the suitcase and the hard drive share is that they are both formats for storage, keeping information transportable and retrievable, echoing the speculative content of Kroll’s drawing practice. Kroll inverts spaces and scales, situating our body inside and outside of these containers, where information gets jumbled between banal documents and personal items that are deeply sentimental. In Working together, Kroll offers an allegorical meditation on being shaped in tandem through memory, distance and intimacy. Through this disorientation, the works ask us to consider what we carry and accumulate —both literally and metaphorically—and how the containers we use to organize our lives inevitably reshape what they hold.
Marlon Kroll is a German Canadian artist living and working in Montréal. He holds a BFA in ceramics from Concordia University and was one of nine recipients of Fonderie Darling’s 2019–22 Montréal Studio Program. He also received the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2020.
Recent exhibitions include Majestic Infinite Inner Choir, 12.26 (Los Angeles); All that we cannot see with Casey Callahan, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha); Cold Open, Unit 17 (Vancouver); The Kroll Show with Bryce Kroll, Gern En Regalia (New York) Lullaby, Management (New York); Map of Dusk, Afternoon Projects (Shanghai); Receiver, Galerie Acappella (Naples); Nesting, Fondation Phi (Montréal); Stress Tested, Public Gallery (London); A Chronique Fear, Marvin Gardens (New York); Rifts, hovels, a sighing tide, Afternoon Projects (Vancouver); La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; At the centre of my ironic faith, Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto); Red Sky at Morning, Interstate Projects (New York); and Thirsty Things, Clint Roenisch (Toronto).
