NYAB Event - Mark Gonzales "Round N' Round"

Mark Gonzales "Round N' Round"

This event has ended.
At Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Media: Drawing, Sculpture, Film

The premiere of a new film and sculpture, as well as drawings, poems and correspondences by Mark Gonzales. Gonzales, who has been skateboarding professionally since he was a teenager is a prime mover in bringing the inherently improvisational, free-ranging attitude manifested in skateboarding's engagement with the built and graphic environment to a wider audience. Gonzales's work has been exhibited internationally, and his skating has been documented by Spike Jonze among other filmmakers. "Round N' Round," which includes recent sculpture and video, as well as a selection from two decades of drawings, poems, and correspondence Gonzales sent to Jocko Weyland, author and curator of the Elk Gallery, defines and further contextualizes the artist's philosophical pursuit of skating. These are brimming over with evidence of influences, cultural touchstones, and historical figures both obscure and well known that Gonzales' incorporates into his work, creating a singular artistic universe that is profoundly allusive and interconnected. In this sense his visual and textual conversation with the wider world around him is shown to be correspondence on a grander scale, an all-encompassing call and response with everything and anything he encounters in those "ecstatic" moments as well in the detritus and scraps of daily life. As Weyland said in a New York Times article about Gonzales in 2003, "the artist Robert Rauschenberg famously declared that he wanted to exist in the gap between art and life. Mark Gonzales performs in that space every day."

[Image: Mark Gonzales "Circle Board" (2009) skateboards and pilot 86 in. high Photo: William Strobeck]