[Features] Tapeworks by Mark Khaisman ~ a SHOUT from the SOUTH!

7/10/2011 in features

Mark Khaisman adalah seorang seniman yang menggunakannya tape sebagai pengganti kuas dan cat pada karyanya. Dengan menggunakan kaca sebagai media untuk karyanya yang unik ini.

Seniman yang lahir di Kiev ini mempelajari seni dan arsitektur di Institut Arsitektur Moskow. Sekarang Khaisman tinggal dan bekerja di Philadelphia. Karya dari seniman ini, lagi-lagi menjadi bukti bahwa tak ada batas dalam membuat sebuah karya. Karyanya berjudul Chair terjual dengan harga $40.700.

Why tape?
It allows for images that can be created only this way.
There are some qualities of tape that make it unique as an art material: its banality, humbleness and “throwaway” nature; it’s default settings of color and width limiting my freedom; its unforgiving translucency – no mistakes can be hidden; the cold and impersonal attitude that tape surface suggests; indifference to the subject - all images rendered in tape are equal.

Is it still a form of conceptual art?
The tape is the message. A parody on Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote could explain the superficial motives, which make up the work. Once the implausible nature of my work is accepted, one can begin to think about the meaning. The latest is born as the result of superimposing the material and images chosen to be portrayed.
I consciously select the iconic images and work them down to maximum reduction, asking the viewer to recognize and complete the work, stimulating both memory and interpretation in the process.

How exactly did you go from being an architect to ‘painting’ with tape? What do the two things have in common?
I was never able to be a real building architect. I was always trying to break through, extend boundaries, and work on the borders, so I was naturally falling out of architecture. I think painting with tape relates to architecture in a very strange way, a love - hate relationship. From one side, my images are constructed and calculated. From another side, my medium is all about deconstruction, anti-construction. My images all imply a fragile, temporary presence, unlike the grandeur architecture aspires to. Breaking the image into.... pixels, layers, converting matter into a visual illusion, this 'anti-matter' approach to the image, is central to my work. Most of my images only exist under certain conditions, like light, and may disappear at any moment.