Exhibition

Mario Marzan creates drawings and sculptures depicting an alternative reality, invented and inspired by the cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction produced by the hurricanes of his childhood in Puerto Rico. Marzan’s drawings and sculptures respond to this changing landscape, through a visual fiction that blurs distinctions between representation and abstraction.  Sequences are constructed that create a “world where memories are topographically stored and distorted to their limits of collapse.”  His drawings are at once explosive with color and subtle with fine lines, presenting a compelling struggle between chaos and control, evoking landscapes of the mind, where forgotten and obscured memories resurface. 

 

Citing an interest in the “temporal construct of place” Marzan has constructed miniature environments, influenced by a constructivist idea of space and experience.”  These structural sculptures exist to be experienced through the viewer’s bodily senses, “including touching and hearing to facilitate the experience of time.”  Inside the structures are small LCD screens depicting experiences:  ocean waves, a child playing.  The sensory pleasures of these constructions ultimately respond to places that struggle between order and disorder.

 

Transient Structures combines Marzan’s drawings with his installation of structures, to create a dialogue that describes and responds to the idea of landscape as a changing record of memory.  Through his drawing and sculptures, Marzan creates a narrative that exists in a landscape oscillating between order and disorder.   

 

Mario Marzan is currently an Assistant Professor in the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his BFA from Bowling Green State University and his MFA at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.