Mark Joshua Epstein: A change in mood and weather

March 20-June 6, 2021

Opening hours: March 20th, 1-6pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce the opening of A change in mood and weather, a solo exhibition of new work by Mark Joshua Epstein in The Skirt Space. Featuring shaped paintings, photographs, and a site-specific wall painting, A change in mood and weather transports viewers inside the temporal and perspectival shifts brought about by the artist’s move from New York City to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Reckoning with the change that accompanies a new studio and landscape, Epstein’s shaped paintings, his largest to date, delve deeper into queer ornament and graphic excess, while limiting their color schemes. Taking inspiration from pattern and decoration, op art, and furniture design, these works continue the artist’s use of ornate patterning and overlapping panels that confound perception, while relishing in a new discomfort of compositional order. Edging toward a warped rectilinearity, Epstein’s paintings impress not just in their flair but in their intricate details. One painting’s title, Finding refuge in inefficiency (2021), nods to the pleasures found in the laborious and time-consuming nature of pattern-making exemplified in the paintings on view. As with all of Epstein’s paintings, these works continue to challenge a viewer’s sense of taste and orientation.

Photographs on exhibit further emphasize Epstein’s painting process. The images reproduce cut-outs created from scraps of paper, which the artist used to generate repetitive patterns within these paintings. Normally used to deliver flatness and depth, shape and form to his fiberglass surfaces, the cut-outs in Epstein’s photographs reframe the landscape surrounding his studio, interweaving his creative environs throughout The Skirt. Running behind, atop, and alongside the paintings and photographs is a site-specific wall painting containing vivid, chromatic hues and a jagged, embellishing frieze. Blending fore and back, wall and work, high and low, remembrance and forgetfulness, A change in mood and weather refuses the either/or of binary polarities and opposing geographic pulls. All the while, by latticing together different planes, motifs, and marks, Epstein's work never forgets its own amusement.

Mark Joshua Epstein received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Epstein has had solo or two person shows at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NY, NY), Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), NARS Foundation Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Caustic Coastal (Salford, England) Vane Gallery (Newcastle, England), Demo Project (Springfield, IL), Biquini Wax Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), Breve (Mexico City, Mexico) and Brian Morris Gallery (New York, NY). 

Selected group shows include Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco (St Louis, MO), DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH), and Beverly’s (New York, NY). 

Epstein has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Macdowell Colony, and Saltonstall Foundation amongst others. His work has appeared in publications such as New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine and Dovetail. 

Epstein has curated or co-curated exhibitions at Woskob Gallery at Penn State University (State College, PA) and MONO Practice (Baltimore, MD), amongst other venues. He currently works as a lecturer at the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design at University of Michigan.

Zahar Vaks is a visual artist born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and living in Brooklyn, N.Y. His paintings, drawings and structures are material narratives actualized by a multi-sensory approach. The olfactory and tactile elements of his work are just as important as the visual. 

Vaks received his BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, on the Island of Svalbard in Norway, and most recently in Beijing, China. In 2018, Zahar was invited to participate in the Rauschenberg Residency. In 2012- 2013, he attended the Galveston Artist Residency. He will be participating in the Artists in Residence (AIR) University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. 

He is a Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

For inquiries please contact Zahar Vaks at zaharvaks@gmail.com