If it’s not mine, it’s mine
Marc Horowitz
September 8 - October 13, 2019
@
Jonathan Hopson
904 Marshall Street
Houston, Texas 77006
Jonathan Hopson is excited to announce If it’s not mine, it’s mine, Marc Horowitz’s forthcoming solo exhibition with the gallery. The assemblage and five individual works on view — motifs within the artist’s expanding but as-of-yet inconclusive forensic system — develop research that took Horowitz from the Roman ruins in Milreu, Portugal to the Dia Foundation in New York, where he encountered Blinky Palermo’s slender, two-tone paintings. Switching between artistic vernaculars, such as the triptych, and archeological tropes, such as the photographic scale, Horowitz parodies the desire to institute mastery over ambiguity and uncertainty found throughout these disciplines. His canvases, in this case photographic scales imprecisely detached from their measurement function, reassert the power of the performative fake, the obvious decoy, the anti-climactic pun, the not-so- funny funny guy. Humor, Horowitz reminds us, detects and ironizes bullshit.
But can it also be beautiful?
By placing the printed and readymade — doctored scans from research manuals, still lifes packaged in their shipping containers, an oil study from 1998 — within a serialized and thus in-progress composition, Horowitz likewise questions the value of time, labor, and sincere sincerity in an age when the digital image has become the quintessential found object. Taking its title from Knots, a collection of tautological poems by twentieth-century psychoanalyst R.D. Laing, If it’s not mine, it’s mine suggests inauthenticity, chaos, and tragedy are givens when aesthetics is our foolish science. But our comedic understanding finds its replicas and source material in such a system. Where laughter reigns, Horowitz promises, there will always be something funny to look at, something so funny as to outlaugh and outlive us.
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Marc Horowitz lives and works in Los Angeles. His aesthetic practice spans photography, sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance. A Creative Time Project Grant Awardee, Horowitz has taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Otis College, and lectured at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the Hammer Museum, Stanford University, and Yale. Recent exhibitions include: Johannes Vogt, New York; Bank Gallery, Shanghai; COMA Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Mannerheim Gallery, Paris; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; and the Depart Foundation, Los Angeles.
