Marlo Pascual

Marlo Pascual:


Marlo Pascual

Work from her oeuvre.

“Taking found imagery and film as a point of departure in her work, Pascual creates photo-based sculptures, installations, and images that employ strategies of artistic movements such as Conceptual Art, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Arte Povera. Re-examining the viewer’s relationship to the photograph, Pascual is interested in exposing an image’s active presence by playing with the relationship between the work, the space, and the viewer. By creating sites of engagement, whether that site is in the form of the domestic or the theatrical, the image is the catalyst.

Pascual culls her vintage pictures from eBay and thrift stores, some coming out of an amateur photography club where the photographers strive to take ‘artistic’ photos. They are of historical genres; still lifes, interiors and furniture, portraits, headshots, nudes, and pin-ups. When they arrive, the images are small, handheld, fetish-like objects. In an interplay with the photograph’s own physicality as an object, Pascual then enlarges, crops, and re-stages the images using minimalist objects, props and lighting to form new relationships. Filtered through her imagination, the subjects are removed from their previous context and recast in new roles.

Previously, Pascual has made serial works. Rocks act as paperweights, pinafores or anvils, obscuring the heads of the characters placed on the floor. Candle sconces anchor the images of wall-based prints, the flames of the shrinking candles streaming down the cheeks of the subjects while burning. Reminiscent of Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II, 1973, photographs are literally propped up or partially concealed by wooden planks that traverse the room, and in others, Flavin-like bulbs pierce images in simultaneous disfigurement and support.

For her first solo exhibition in the gallery, Pascual continues to break, acknowledge and play with the picture plane. Among others, a photograph bends up from floor to wall like a stage for the domestic prop placed upon it, an image of a wine glass and crystal decanter lies shattered on the floor, and slapstick characters call to each other across the wall. A table and chair provide the stage for a ‘homemade’ vintage pin up and moveable panels create a readymade living room. Characters and objects collide in artworks that capture the “construction” performed to create them.” – Casey Kaplan Gallery