Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection

In Mark Leckey’s sculpture Inflatable Felix, a thirty-one-foot version of the mischievous cartoon cat sits slumped on the ground of the gallery in a kind of slacker repose. Little did we know that a three-dimensional doll-like version of this cartoon character was the subject of the first experimental television broadcast in 1928. As with all radio and television transmissions, this image of Felix is still travelling through the ether of deep space at the speed of light. It’s for this reason that Leckey has described Felix as a kind of avatar of the modern world, in which images and information are transmitted at a volume and speed that television broadcasting pioneers could not even imagine. “For me, Felix symbolizes the way in which technology blends the real and virtual worlds.”

Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection brings together a group of fifty-eight international artists working across a wide range of mediums who each in their own way similarly send signals into the ether for us to hear.

Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection brings together a group of fifty-eight international artists working across a wide range of mediums who each in their own way similarly send signals into the ether for us to hear. Some of the artists on view, such as Leckey, deal directly with the history of electronic broadcasting, while others explore the idea of transmission conceptually, through the lens of seeing and being seen. Deana Lawson’s meticulously staged mother-daughter portrait, for example, is in some ways about the act of transmission as it draws us into a mirrored exchange of gazes between its subjects, the camera and the spectator, while artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Sherrie Levine explore transmission through painting, deploying a wide variety of alternative strategies and unusual materials to disrupt the medium’s traditional applications. In other works, such as Kaari Upson’s charcoal wall reliefs, the movement of the artist’s body is used to transmit signals. And in Glenn Ligon’s coal-dust meditation on difference and belonging, it is written language that takes center stage.

Photography occupies an important place in this exhibition as well, with artists such as Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Anne Collier appropriating images from the flow of transmitted commercial advertising and popular culture in order to disrupt, redirect, or repurpose their original messages. Meanwhile, in Wolfgang Tillman’s “cameraless” abstractions and Thomas Demand’s Dailies, the medium is used to fashion entirely new worlds.

Whether delving into the realm of abstraction or culling images from the world around us, each of these artists generates a kind of transmission, a signal that is projected out to the viewer in order to ask a wide array of questions about the real and virtual worlds that we inhabit.

Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection is curated by MAF Director Hanneke Skerath and independent writer and curator Douglas Fogle.