Mark Verabioff : overawe

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 26th 2008, 6pm to 8pm

Angstrom Gallery is proud to present overawe, an exhibition by Canadian-born Los Angeles-based artist Mark Verabioff. A reception for the artist will be held January 26th from six to eight in the evening.

In the early 90’s while living in New York, Mark Verabioff began developing a series of text-based works that have since become known as “dartboards”. These text-based installations evolved out of the artist’s desire to create a hybrid signature linguistic strategy. They began as guerrilla actions outside of the traditional gallery space installed in environments such as gay bars, motel rooms, and on the street. By blending the rhetoric of celebrity, political and pop culture, these works question and explore the fascination with contemporary popular culture and art. The dartboards create a series of open-ended narratives that intentionally disturb and decenter. Since one of Verabioff’s guerrilla dart actions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, the works have manifested into private actions that have become sculptural wall works, which still exude their guerrilla origins. Two of these dartboards will be exhibited in overawe.

Verabioff’s exhibition will also include a suite of 18 “page tears” from the book What Becomes A Legend Most? The Blackglama Story by Peter Rogers. The suite is entitled The Blackglama Insurgents. Using these pictorials photographed by Richard Avedon and Bill King of female celebrities from the furrier’s ad campaign from 1968 to 1979, Verabioff marks them with a masculine gesture in spray paint referencing male sexual pleasure and violence. Handwritten text of famous artworks from contemporary female artists is added to the images cutting into this play of art history’s selection and exclusion.

Verabioff’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the US and internationally including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, Artists Space, New York, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aries, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Pitt International Gallery, Vancouver, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Mandrake, Los Angeles.

Mark Verabioff
overawe