NYAB Event - Meredyth Sparks "We Were Strangers For Too Long"

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At Elizabeth Dee
Media: Sculpture, Installation

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Elizabeth Dee presents Meredyth Sparks’ New York gallery debut, We were strangers for too long. The show includes new collaged works, wall-based installations and sculptural editions.

In her multi-layered works, Sparks mines images from (sub) cultural sources. Building up the surface of her found imagery by formally breaking down compositional elements, Sparks reworks images in Photoshop—scanning, cropping and layering—before manually applying foil, glitter and vinyl to the printed surface. For this show, Sparks focuses exclusively on figures from 1972 through 1977 (Ian Curtis, Kraftwork, Gudrun Ensslin, etc.), a period she designates as a bellwether point of resistance prior to the rise of Reagan, Thatcher and the Neo-Conservative movement. Constructivist iconography appears in her wall-based installations, alongside glitter, vinyl and aluminum foil—materials one might associate with the rise of late capitalism—complicating the counter-cultural and revolutionary spirit to which her work refers. Although the depicted figures are sometimes familiar or iconic, through a series of interventions and ruptures in the surface of the image Sparks frustrates the viewer’s desire to make contact, highlighting how these figures have, in turn, been co-opted by the very ideologies they sought to dismantle. As suggested in the ambiguity of the show’s title, Sparks’ stagings construct a performative space in which the relationship between artist, viewer and image remains indeterminate and unstable.

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