Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Mark Licari.
Mark Licari is known for his strikingly original vision of worlds in which the ordinary spins playfully out of control, where domestic order unravels, everything decays messily, and boundaries dissolve explosively between inside and outside, nature and technology, growth and putrefaction, and the normal and the uncanny. Both humorous and disturbing, the work itself often breaks out of the picture frame to take over entire rooms, as at shows at the Drawing Center in New York (2005), and in his installations at Hamilton Press (2004) and Equator Books (2005) in Venice, California.
In Month-to-Month — which will present framed works on paper as well as an outdoor installation — Licari continues to explore themes of disorder, temporality, and the destructive side of nature, while exposing the potential of the fantastic to lurk beneath mundane day-to-day, or month-to-month, living. The domestic scenes turned surreal — a bathtub overflows with an octopus, a pigeon nursing a baseball nestles amidst the overflowing contents of a chest of drawers — seem to reside in the unsettled and transient world of month-to-month rentals. Other pieces offer uncanny juxtapositions: An airplane spewing flames sends letters flying through a sky filled with dripping clouds; A lamb beset by slightly aggressive butterflies stands incongruously in a post-apocalyptic landscape; Rorschachs are drawn over to create bugs and bats.
Mark Licari was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles since completing his MFA at USC in 2000. His work was included in group shows in 2006, which also saw the publication of Mark Licari: Drawing With an Appetite, a 180-page catalogue of work from the last five years, published by Honor Fraser Gallery. With an introduction and interview by Kristine McKenna.