Jenny Jaskey Presents Mark Shetabi: Elevation
Philadelphia, PA (July 6, 2007) — Jenny Jaskey is pleased to announce the opening of Elevation, a solo exhibition by Mark Shetabi. The exhibition will be on view from September 13 to October 26, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 20, 2007, from 6 to 9 pm. The reception is free and open to the public.
In his painting and sculpture, Shetabi uses architectural forms, both real and imagined, as a departure point to examine ideas having to do with public and private space. The work begins from an investigation of the forms that constitute the visual “white noise” in contemporary life. Within this vocabulary of the boring and the ordinary, background forms and sensations are transformed into foreground issues. The focus is less on the high art tradition of architecture as practiced by Bunshaft, Corbusier, Mies, Kahn, and other Utopian Modernists, and more on the ambiguous trickle down of this legacy. The Guggenheim spiral becomes a parking garage. Corbusier’s Villa Savoye becomes a drive-thru. The piazza becomes a zone of constant surveillance.
In Elevation, Shetabi explores the grey area that exists between the larger world and the models used to represent it. At what point does the model become a thing unto itself, and not simply a representation? Is it possible to completely know a reality, or must we always look through a frame of reference of some kind? With the distance that a model affords, one can survey the complexity of a larger system. At the same time, this distance isolates the viewer from the experience.
Two new sculptures, one diminutive and one immense, will be shown. Both are models of a parking garage tower. One model sits inside a Plexiglas display case. The other “model” is over 30 feet long and occupies the majority of the gallery’s large exhibition space.
Also exhibited alongside the sculpture are several paintings based on the same parking garage form. Whether the sculpture is the model for the paintings or vice versa is unclear. The exhibition contains multiple layers of representation, and a confusion of the model and reality is a desired end result.
Born in New York, as a child Mark Shetabi lived for five years in Tehran, Iran. His family returned to the United States in 1979, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. The experience of being between cultures has been an enduring subtext of his artistic practice. He received an MFA in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Shetabi has had numerous national exhibitions including solo shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, Ratio 3 in San Francisco, and Locks Gallery and Project Room in Philadelphia. He is a 2002 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Shetabi currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art.
Jenny Jaskey is located at Tower Gallery, 969 N. 2nd Street in Philadelphia, PA. For additional information, please contact Jenny Jaskey at 215.253.9874 or visit www.jennyjaskey.com.
