Martos Gallery is pleased to announce the grand opening of its new location in Chinatown with Invisible Man, a group presentation featuring new works by Torkwase Dyson, Pope.L, Kayode Ojo, and Jessica Vaughn.
Invisible Man reflects on how bodies use, manipulate and move through their environments, and transforms the gallery into a temporary home for invisible bodies. The objects in this show combine the found, fabricated and refurbished, and change some of the rules of certain fixed systems:
Torkwase Dyson’s large scale almost white-on-white paintings are only seemingly reductive. They operate as a kind of legend with hidden demographic and geographic references, while still maintaining some material anonymity; Pope.L turns water upside down and on its side. You are not permitted to drink from this fountain, or from these glasses. You can look, thirstily, from afar; Kayode Ojo stands a velvet couch on its side, draped with a sequined gown. You can’t sit on it. But someone has left their mark, giving the sense that it is no longer being used but not quite thrown away; Jessica Vaughn’s site-specific wall installation of upholstered Chicago public transportation seats simulate an improvised figuration of a typically predetermined urban common ground.
Invisible Man is titled after Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
