Mark Leibert | Hotel Mirror
Exhibition Dates: June 11 - August 7
Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to announce the latest body of work from artist Mark Leibert entitled Hotel Mirror. Leibert’s Hotel Mirror is an homage to the power of chance, with its cycle of happy moments and broken souls, and a moving glimpse at the fleeting characters surfing the lacunae of an unprecedented era of flux and global loss. Many of the 20-plus paintings and works on paper in the show exist in a continuum between figuration and abstraction, form and void. They scramble our notions of the objective and subjective, and the line between hard science and the soft machine of individual perception. In the quasi-aftermath of a global pandemic we come face to face with the unexpected — and, like hotels and the mirrors they contain, we are asked to reflect upon questions of transiency, perspective, reflection, and isolation.
A thinker and maker, Leibert employs paint, graphic design, artificial intelligence, and algorithms into his creative process as a pigment-and-pixel provocateur. A good majority of the paintings and drawings in Hotel Mirror share the same aspect ratio and suggest stills from a hypothetical animation or film. The works also highlight Leibert’s ongoing commitment to engage with material processes and pigments in a way that honors traditional forms of art-making at the same time as it engages with the ephemeral and evolving aspects of digital forms and technologies. These works form a unique bridge between traditions of painting and drawing and emerging forms of visualization and categorization that engage with technology. The works are inspired and driven by the imagination, photographic archives, machine learning drawings from a convolutional neural network, and what Leibert calls a “casino of chance-making”--an algorithmic game, rooted in the history of chance-controlled composition in art. Leibert’s transient figures come and go, entwined and refracted through prisms of personal history, filmic and fictional depictions of Hawaii, and ‘70s surfer magazines. Some of them linger with thousand-mile stares, while others appear to be caught mid-performance, in a blur of movement. All of them ask a fundamental--and sometimes harrowing--question in a moment unmoored from global and personal certainties: What does the mirror see?
MARK LEIBERT was born and raised in Honolulu and now lives and works in Atlanta. His works explore an other-worldly space that spans abstraction and figuration. His practice includes painting, drawing, time-based works, photography, and installation. His paintings were selected for No. 58 of New American Paintings, the juried exhibition-in-print. He has taught at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Georgia State University, SCAD Atlanta, Georgia Institute of Technology, and James Madison University. His work is in private and corporate collections, including High Museum of Art, Capital One, and The Ritz-Carlton, among others. He is a co-founder of Day & Night Projects, an Atlanta artist-run exhibition space. He received a BA from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Leibert is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery. He is currently a Professor of the Practice in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where he teaches courses on visual culture, art, and design.