Marshall LaCount Quieter Places
On view July 20 to October 18, 2018 Noon to 9PM Exhibit Salon 182 Driggs, Ave. Brooklyn, NY
“I’m fine,” he offered, wryly. It was not so much a story about hitchhiking across the country as about the vulnerabilities that emerge in the course of a journey, intimate horizons that demand the negotiation of how much one can bear to feel.
Horizons connect the works on display, at times literal, at times a playful gesture or an inside joke. Quieter Places makes sense through contrasts of materials and textures, the grit of trade labor and the levity of dripping rainbows. Composed largely of plaster, spray paint, and acrylic, the thick grooves of a trowel linger, edging into volumes sanded away or almost level. This series of six paintings and one serigraph entertains the possibility of containment, but ultimately pushes beyond, never staying put long enough to feel at home.
Searching for a quieter place only seems contradictory here. LaCount insinuates places that unfold from—that develop toward—other places that fix the viewer momentarily—a sun, a moon, a horizon—only to reveal that that place has already changed, again, and without realizing it—shadow. Sometimes that place is spiritual, sometimes literal, sometimes hidden as a negative, waiting for the eye to recognize that what lingers there, on that other side, across the horizon, is a stillness that ripples, an afterglow.
Connecting each of these landscape portraits is the promise of a new perspective. Horizons as limits to feeling, horizons that suture and scrape, iterations of textures that make stillness transient. The horizon as mantra.
In “Moon,” the trowel’s thickness gives way to a multicolor cascade of vertical lines. What once was a horizon has now become a contradictory block of color that nevertheless seems prone to erasure, or change, or memory. A juncture that reminds of the stillness that once was.
Near the entrance, “Horizon” holds two sweeping gestures that intersect a faded green horizon. Aerosol meets plaster. And suddenly to the right a breach in the panel that has been screwed back in. A section that completes the gesture but only as evidence of its material construction, only as a piece, a place, that might be quieter.
Marshall LaCount is an interdisciplinary artist and producer living in Brooklyn.
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Joseph M. Pierce Stony Brook University