Cheryl Bentley and Mark Starling Exhibition

Junior Projects

This event has ended.

JUNIOR PROJECTS presents an exhibition of new works by Cheryl Bentley and Mark Starling. This is the first time the artists are exhibiting at the gallery.

Cheryl Bentley’s multi-disciplinary practice considers the fluid boundaries of contemporary
sexuality within complex hegemonic social structures, and espouses a self-styled mysticism
stemming from her involvement with New Age practices. Excavating a chthonic landscape,
Bentley’s work explores dark primordial urges and spirited excess on her path to an awakened
psyche. In “I’m a kind person in the garden,” a pink childlike figure skips transcendentally over a
color-saturated, psychedelic landscape. Bentley borrows from Henri Matisse’s dancers and
endows the figure here, and in her other works on paper, with meticulously drawn circles
referencing orifices, the sun, and clouds. These circular forms are a nod to George Bataille’s
essay, Solar Anus, a rapture on gross excess, entanglement, and finally decay. In another work,
“Blue: Toes,” a human figure’s hirsute legs, bloodless feet, and morgue toe tag emerge from a
sensuously morbid field of pink and blue hair. Here, Bentley meshes themes of sexuality,
longing, and mortality, as she does in much of her sculpture, photography, and installation
work.

Mark Starling’s sculpture explores notions of mortality and immortality, societal convention in
addressing the natural cycle of death and healing, and the human drive to sustain life at all
costs, a spectrum that spans anti-aging salves to medically-induced life support. His work is
informed by being raised in a family that runs a funeral home, and for a time living in an apartment above the funeral home, specifically over the casket room. Standing before one of Starling’s sculptures one can’t help but think of the opening pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s
epic autobiographical Min Kamp series in which he discusses humanity’s oddly hypocritical
obsession with death and dying, particularly in the media, and equally concerted effort to keep
expired bodies out of the sight of the living. In Intention and Expectation for example, Starling
explores the literal and figurative boundaries of a casket cover. Starling added a multivitamin to
a full bottle of water, embedded the bottle in paint, and then affixed the full bottle to what is to
be read as a door-cum-coffin-cover. Here he alludes to our society’s transfixion with eternal
youth, the cycle of death and rebirth, and the spiritually therapeutic effects of the funeral as
rite-of-passage and social mores.

Cheryl Bentley was born in El Paso, Texas in 1983 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn,
NY. She received her MFA from the NYU Steinhardt School in 2014 and her BA in Art Practice
from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. She has exhibited at 80WSE, New York, NY,
S.H.E.D. Projects, Oakland, CA, and Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkeley, California.

Mark Starling was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1987 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn,
NY. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the University of
Georgia. He has exhibited at Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY, the Georgia Museum of Art,
Athens, GA, Tribeca Cinemas, New York, NY and Artspace, New Haven, CT.

Media

Schedule

from March 15, 2015 to May 03, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-03-15 from 18:00 to 20:00

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