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Mark Schubert’s work was on view at Monya Rowe Gallery in April.
Mark Shubert, Car Top, 2006. Mixed media, approx. 43 x 36 x 35 in. Courtesy of Monya Rowe Gallery.I was trained as a painter in the Midwest and switched to sculpture around 2002 after moving to New York. At the time, I was casting and modeling objects based on specific ideas—enlarging the interior space of a doll or putting a tree stump through a chipper and casting the remains into a mold of the original stump. The main thing was that there was an internal logic to this kind of work. The objects were almost an afterthought that had been determined by language. I had been an intuitive painter and a more or less idea driven sculptor.
After that I worked in a fabrication studio. A lot of the work was highly finished. Frankly, I fabricated so many objects for other artists that I did not want to develop in that direction. I did not want to become a fabricator for myself, so the intuitive approach I originally had to painting resurfaced later in my sculpture. In that work, I became interested in the possibility of found objects. Not exclusively for their meaning or semiotic possibilities, but for the formal ones. With that in mind I began shaping them, and incorporating them into fully abstract forms. In them I combine the twisting and reconfiguring of (mainly) plastic and metal found objects, with improvised bulbous hand-sculpted abstract forms made up of pigmented resin, fiberglass, paint and polyurethane foam. The materials are disposable and to some extent local; plastic chairs, car top carriers, coolers, toy wheel barrows, metal drums, and other remnants of consumer society. I am not overly concerned with the idea of consumption as much as how the objects relate to space. How the chair, as a receptacle for the body, implies it; even when it is torqued, flattened out, and opened up.
Implicit is also the denial of function/utility of these objects through a kind of physical tension. The intersection of the squeezed, bulbous, and almost cartoonish forms, with the cut scrambled plastic and metal, creates the exact tension I seek; a pathetic, goofy and deflated kind of contemporary violence. This is in opposition to say Chamberlain’s more heroic manipulations.
The process is a slow one. I spend weeks thinking and changing the form. In that sense, I am closer to a kind of early modernism. The resin coating and painting occurs pretty fast, usually a few days. The look of aggression and apparent formal directness belies the fact that these are carefully considered and constructed works.
