mark

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a group show of work by Erica Baum, Shannon Ebner, Louise Fishman, Al Loving and Suzanne McClelland. Entitled mark, the exhibition will run from 08 March through 21 April 2018. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street in New York.

The study of etymology proves most English words to be tightly-packed envelopes of content, context and historical time. With just a few additional moments of consideration, a word as simple as mark dissolves like a lozenge into a panoply of referents.

mark (n): “trace, impression”: The large-scaled canvas titled MY GUERNICA by Louise Fishman carries the compositional rigor of its namesake; its abraded surface suggests a more tightly-spun painting that has been scraped away, leaving only the traces and impressions of a previous and different work.

From Old English mearc (n): “boundary, sign, limit, mark”: Erica Baum’s photographs of erased blackboards belie the dusty, workable surface of their subjects: the boundary between lens and slate is a spectral, imprecise realm. Shannon Ebner’s concrete poetry is rendered similarly—in the unreal space of the black and white print.

Also source of Old Norse mörk (n): “forest”: in ancient Scandinavia, treelines often marked a frontier. Al Loving’s pulped paper works explore similar frontiers: made in the 1980s, these lesser-known shaped works distend the rectangular picture plane and confound the norms of paper-as-support—made of rigid, hardy pulp, the works require no mounting and reside in sculptural space.

mark (n. 2): “unit of money or weight” (from Late Old English): Suzanne McClelland’s recent work dissolves its linguistic content into active fields of mark-making: the partially-legible script references global culture’s units of human measurement: body size and net worth. The verso of every recent panel reveals a photocopy collage of source material on the painting’s subject (usually an all-too-powerful male figure from politics or pop culture), serving as a key to the active and apocryphal painting surface. McClelland’s work explores mark at its deepest etymological levels.

Mark (v. 1): “to trace out boundaries” (from Proto Germanic “markojan”): mark is an exhibition defined by the connective tissue between individual artists. As the word mark loses all meaning through repetition and over-analysis, the viewer of mark is encouraged to consider the marks made by these five artists and trace her or his own boundaries within the exhibition.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please call 212.279.9219.