Marc Swanson lives and works in Brooklyn. He uses a variety of materials–from crystals and glitter to lumber and deerskin–to make sculptures that examine renewal, personal history, mortality, and rites of passage. He received an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and has recently solo exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery in New York and Julia Friedman Gallery in Chicago. Marc Swanson is a sculptor and installation artist. Swanson’s repeated use of central motifs has resulted in a body of poignant, witty, often self-referential works. In “Killing Moon #3,” Swanson creates a self-portrait as a Yeti in his lair in the boiler room at P. S. 1 for the Greater New York show (2005).
Marc Swanson art work
Marc Swanson’s Fits and Starts is a sculpture of a life-size deer, entirely encrusted in rhinestone crystals. The deer is portrayed mid-leap, its hind legs in the air and its head turned, as if glancing back at a person or another animal in pursuit. Swanson, who views the sculpture in terms of fantasy and desire, notes that the deer is an alluring and elusive creature that is simultaneously darting away and frozen in time. The graceful sculpture suggests an unattainable object of adoration, trying to flee those who wish to approach. Swanson has made several related deer-head sculptures, which he calls his “surrogates,” encrusting the conventional hunter’s trophy with dazzling rhinestones and hanging it on the wall
About Marc Swanson Exhibitions
Marc Swanson’s second solo exhibition at Bellwether, “Live Free or Die,” was an anthem to crushed dreams and hopes for the future. Conceived as a four-part installation comprising individual artworks fitted into a loosely autobiographical scenario, the show roughly conveyed the artist’s coming to terms with his homosexuality and his politically conservative, rural New Hampshire roots. It also suggested a lapsed search for the possibility of renewal in a psychically devastated landscape.
Conclusion of this article:
Swanson’s honky-tonk environment initially seemed to be at odds with his purportedly self-revelatory intent. Each tired symbol pumped up the volume of exhausted artifice. Yet on some level, the contrivance of this deliberately awful down-and-out setting, with its dime-store mannequins and cheaply realized decor–made with, among other things, glitter, sgraffitoed Plexiglas, hockey tape, hanging T-shirts, rope nets, dirt and deerskin–seemed to offer an authentic glimpse into the artist’s sense of abject futility, Goth morbidity and misplaced projection of gay fabulousness.
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