Visitors to Mark Jenkins’s new solo show “REMIX” at Arsenal Montreal will encounter familiar paintings turned three-dimensional — with additional twists.A decade has passed since Jenkins, a self-taught street and installation artist, was invited to participate in a group exhibition in London curated by Bansky, after which he gained international notoriety. His newest works were created during an extended residency at Arsenal, which commissioned the series.The Washington, DC-based artist took as starting points 11 well-known paintings, sculptures, and photographs, such as Rodin’s “The Thinker” and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Using actual Montreal residents as models, he began sculpting them as the human figures in these notable pieces, though not as exact replicas. Rather, each “remix” is imbued with a darkly comic irreverence that is a common theme Jenkins explores in his work, located both inside and outside the gallery space.In “Nipple Switch,” for example, he dresses the two women from “Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters,” 1594 (artist unknown), in a bland wardrobe of sweaters, jeans, and sneakers — but also with lampshades atop their heads. In this case, the bulbs within turn on and off sporadically, animating the potentially titillating gesture itself. Another piece turns René Magritte’s “The Lovers,” 1928, into a menacing threat: the eyes of the suited figure are blind to the kitchen knife in the woman’s hand, against which the roses placed in his own will be no match.At first, Jenkins had some trepidations about the project, but began to have ideas “after surfing the net to see all the Photoshop remixes done of these iconic pieces,” he said. “Of course, the painful part is that instead of doing a Photoshop comp in five minutes, this project took five months. But if anything I learned quite a bit about the works [I used]. Take ‘American Gothic,’ for instance — you can go to the American Gothic house, take a tour and they have clothes on hand for you and your friend, mother, or lover to strike the iconic pose with the pitchfork. I don’t know how well my works rank against what’s out there on the web, but as a collection for a show, it’s somehow stimulating to the senses, mine at least, and I’m generally pretty flat emotionally, especially to my own work.”Comparisons to Banksy seem inevitable, specifically the reclusive artist’s Monet tribute in which he paints shopping carts that have fallen into the water in “Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lillies,” 1899. But when asked about how Jenkins’s work relates to that of other artists, Jean-François Bélisle, director of Arsenal, stated that “when you see signs or traces of other works or artists, as is the case with this exhibition, in his work, it feels more like a superimposition of novel ideas rather than a simple conversation. His art exists in between genres.”“Mark Jenkins: REMIX” is on view at Arsenal Montreal from March 18 through May 8.
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