Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM, presents over 200 artworks from China Marks’s sewn oeuvre, offering the broadest survey of the artist’s hypnagogic tableaux of storytelling to date. China Marks dedicated the last 23 years of her active art practice to producing more than 600 sewn works. Lucid Perturbations, on view from May 15 to July 11, reveals the depth of Marks’s artistic psyche and the range of her intuitive responses to the travesties and phenomena of our world, its power dynamics, and the tragicomedy or psychology of human relationships. The exhibition title comes from Mark’s own observation of how each work “remains lucid despite the perturbations of the fabric,” speaking to the paradox in coherence of imagery despite the disjointed, the disconcerting, and the enigmatic.
“I am after as complex a truth as possible. My drawings reflect the world in all its glory, horror, and absurdity — its workers and slugs; sleepwalkers and prophets. Who is in charge, and who suffers because of that? Why does the past keep biting us in the ass? What does it mean to be in love?”
—China Marks
Left: China Marks, ”Above and Below” (2022), fabric, thread, fusible adhesive, Jade glue, 49 x 52 inches; Right: China Marks, “The Reckoning” (2009), fabric, lace, thread, screen-printing ink, buttons, plastic googly eye, fusible adhesive, Jade glue, 54 x 55 3/4 inches (photo by Dan Dragan)
In 2000, at age 59, Marks decided to pivot from painting, printmaking, and sculpture to exclusively sewing together the many joys, sorrows, and contradictions of life into emotionally resonant, if not beautifully bizarre, scenes that are, in turns, uncomfortably familiar and cryptic. Until now, Mark’s many worlds have been a universe predominantly private to her.
Marks’s works immerse viewers in a world where iconic tropes of Western culture are inverted — stories of divine sacrifice become allegory for racialized violence; the geopolitical quagmire of the Middle East becomes a sardonic condemnation of Western apathy; and tragicomic scenes of intersubjectivity become mirrors of our human condition.
Left: China Marks, “A Junkyard in the Jungle” (2019), fabric, thread, colored stones, lace, tin ex-voto, fusible adhesive, 41 1/2 x 53 inches; Right: China Marks, “The Giveaway” (2016), fabric, lace, thread, screen-printing ink, sequins, button, fusible adhesive on a contemporary tapestry copy of the “Manchester Madonna,” an unfinished painting creditably attributed to Michelangelo, 40 x 30 inches
Zane Bennett gallery director, Carina Evangelista, posits that Marks’s scenes foster “a literary kind of pareidolia,” the human tendency to perceive figures, especially faces, within random patterns. She notes that in viewing Marks’s work, one tries to limn “the narrative, the proverb, the political message, or dirge.”
Marks refers to her composite pictography as “an accumulation of truths that are remarkably honest and sometimes cut to the bone.” In Marks’s hands, fabric scraps and thread become the medium for narrative painting. To her, “sewing/drawing is the essential transformative agent, an uncanny truth-teller.”
To learn more, visit zanebennettgallery.com.
