Mark DeLong featured on AQNB

August 11, 2016

Mark DeLong’s current exhibition Seven Shades of Sugar was recently reviewed on aqnb.

“Attraction is a powerful thing in art and in life. In art, people tend to argue against its power, overlooking beauty in favour of theory. It is often the case, with art, that where such power is missing, theory can be found poorly compensating for it; filling the void of feeling to placate the contemporary art world’s consumerism veiled by academia. There are many mouths and words making up for the lack of attraction and emotion in a lot of contemporary art today.

I first came across Mark Delong’s work via Instagram. I paused longer than the usual 0.5 seconds it takes me to process an image in my feed and I just stared at it confusedly. I was looking at something that I had never seen before, a richly layered and colorful arrangement of fabrics, cut out and sewn back together, forming an image that had no point of reference in my brain’s visual dictionary, something that was living in its own world. I found myself very attracted to it at a very core human level.

It’s difficult to describe Delong’s work, but it’s very easy to feel it. It’s because the art comes out of the universe he creates for it. Walking into his Seven Shades of Sugar solo exhibition, running at Cooper Cole from August 4 to September 3, I feel relieved. Finally, I am able to feel something in a gallery that isn’t the irritation at the theory occupying the space, and just focus on experiencing the work. It takes more than a minute to realize that the majority is made using discarded cardboard boxes collected from the streets of Vancouver, where the artist is based. With works like ‘Seven Shades of Sugar’ (2016, cotton thread on cardboard), he manages to use the material in a way that completely disassociates the viewer from any consumer reference, and I honestly don’t know how he manages to do it, which is quite an achievement. We are well-trained consumers that could more readily spot a brand in a pile of trash than the moon in the clear night’s sky. To be fooled into missing these corporate signifiers is a feat.

There is something to be said about harmony and the balance of color and composition, moreover the feeling it can evoke —on its own, without a single word, if the right visual cues are well in their place. ‘Putting my Boots on Again and Again’ (2015) is a display of crosses and clovers composed of various pink, green, and cream-colored fabrics that form a quilt, glyphs that send me a message I can’t decode. They get lost in emblems, composed of needlework, patterning, and made-up symbols that feel like they belong to us —to a history. Their formula is familiar and feels centuries-old yet belong to no one but Delong. To feel them is to feel him: an intricate constellation of careful choices, of hand-picked spaces between words that take you back to a past life, or to alternate worlds. Only they’re not yours, they’re Delong’s.”

-Audrey Phillips

To see the full post online, please visit aqnb.

For more information about Mark DeLong please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement	1 year	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Advertisement".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	1 year	This cookies is set by GDPR Cookie Consent WordPress Plugin. The cookie is used to remember the user consent for the cookies under the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	1 year	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	1 year	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".

Cookie	Duration	Description
_ga	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid	1 day	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages viisted in an anonymous form.

Cookie	Duration	Description
IDE	1 year 24 days	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
test_cookie	15 minutes	This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the user's browser supports cookies.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	5 months 27 days	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.

Cookie	Duration	Description
CONSENT	16 years 9 months 23 days 2 hours	No description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	1 year	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	1 year	No description
_gat_gtag_UA_135534658_1	1 minute	No description