Mark
Mann
Four Easy Pieces, Laurence Miller Gallery
May 5 – June 30, 2005
From May 5 to June 30, 2005, Laurence Miller Gallery will present
four large-scale color photographs by Mark Mann, an elegant riff
on his two previous bodies of work, Wish You Were Here and Are We
There Yet? The America of family vacations – those summer
migrations that lead to theme parks and fast food and exhaustion
in motels on the edge of town --- is still the topic, but here four
vignettes encapsulate a day in the life of a seriously vacationing
American family.
Like the movie from which the title of Mann’s show is ironically
derived, these four pieces are nuanced and complex, and layered
with a sense of humor-noir: Rest-Rant invokes a tension that calls
to mind the famous “toast” scene from Five Easy Pieces:
a man sits inside a diner, his female traveling companion waits
in the driver’s seat of the car outside. One senses that if
something has not happened yet, it soon will. This uneasiness, about
what has happened or will happen soon, permeates every photograph
in the show. In Cement Pond an empty row of lounge chairs at the
edge of a swimming pool conveys more a sense of danger than absence;
Frontier Town, where two young tykes make ready for a showdown (at
high noon?), harks back to a time when playing cowboys and Indians
was innocent. In todays politically correct climate this photograph
takes on an element of horror that would otherwise never have existed.
The fourth piece in the show, Red Room, in its quiet, may be the
most mysterious of them all, and the most open to interpretation
by individual experience. Based on our own childhood recollections
of vacation moments gone sour, we revel in trying to answer questions
that are raised by the simple depiction of a single child sitting
alone in an empty motel room.
Mann belongs to the contemporary tradition of picture-making that
includes Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti, photographers whose
pictures as a group describe a journey, but individually form a
chapter in said journey, a narrative unto themselves.
Mark Mann’s work has been collected by the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, and is currently part of the traveling exhibition
Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, at the
Corcoran Museum, Washington D.C.
