We Cast Shadows: New Work by Mark Garry | July 12- August 24, 2014

The City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs presents We Cast Shadows: New Work by Mark Garry at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park from July 12 – August 24, 2014. Irish artist Mark Garry will transform the exhibition space with an installation of new works and ephemera created for the site. Utilizing a variety of media and mechanisms, his delicately considered works are measured and quiet, requiring meticulous systems of construction. Combining physical, visual and sensory analogues, the installation arranges elements that intersect the space and form relationships between a given room and each other, creating a situation that is at once empathetic and spectacular.

Music plays a large part of Mark’s practice, and the exhibition will include listening posts so that patrons can experience his recording projects, A Generous Act and Sending Letters to the Sea.

This eagerly anticipated exhibition will be on view beginning Saturday, July 12, with a preview and reception with the artist on Thursday, July 10 from 5 to 7 pm. These events are free and open to the public.

We Cast Shadows is Mark’s fourth solo exhibition of 2014. The title of this exhibition refers to the manner in which cultural and social legacies are retained by a society. Mark is making a number of interventions in the gallery, including light works, ambitious thread constructions, and wall drawings, photos, and sculptures.

 About the Artist

Mark’s work stems from a fundamental interest in observing how humans navigate the world and the subjectivity and complex characteristics inherent in these navigations.  While Mark uses a variety of media and mechanisms in his practice, he primarily focuses on institution-based installations. These installations incorporate a specific range of natural and craft materials and processes such as plants, thread, beads, woodcarvings and manufactured materials such as colored contact, origami, and mechanical musical mechanisms. Spectrums of colored threads are in many cases the central element of these installations. This practice is a generative process and involves the stretching and consolidating of the physical capabilities of the materials he works with, both as individual entities and when combined with other materials and objects. Through his intervention one’s perception of these materials is altered fundamentally from their utilitarian origins. As the critic Declan Long has noted, “Mark Garry’s art thrives on a potential for connectibility: his is a hugely hospitable manner of practice, open to new collaborations and new translations between forms and ideas…These are tentative, tender realizations of evolving ideas: fragile forms based on unorthodox affiliations.”

Born and currently based in Ireland, Mark practiced as a curator and writer prior to developing an art practice in 2003. Mark represented Ireland at Venice at Venice Biennial (2005). Current and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Lafayette Projects, Marseille, France (2014)The Kerlin Gallery Dublin (2014) and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2015). Recent exhibitions include The Model, Sligo (2014); Sommer & Kohl, Berlin (2013); ENart Taichung, Taiwan (2013); Galleria Civica di Moderna, Milan (2013); a permanent commission for The MAC, Belfast, (2012); White Box, New York (2012); The Model, Sligo (2012); Cave, Detroit (2011); Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2011); Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2009); Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane, Dublin (2009); Tai Turin Art International, CRAA Centro Ricerca Arte Attuale, Torino, Italy (2009); IMMA, Dublin (2008); The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania (2008); Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown, Sydney (2008); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2006). Garry represented Ireland at Venice at Venice Biennial (2005), which traveled to Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2006).

This exhibition is made possible by generous support from Culture Ireland.