Downtown, Los Angeles
Ian Markell
Nothing Now Anything Anytime
Bad ReputationNothing Now Anything Anytime is Ian Markell’s first solo exhibition with Bad Reputation since joining the gallery’s program in 2017. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles to date. The show debuts three new sculptures and two image based works. The artist turns a carpeted DJ platform into a hollow vault for the safekeeping of an underexposed photograph. HUB99, 0.72AMP ARM and RISER (all 2018) make common social templates modular. The systemic is excavated for the allegorical, back and forth, physically and functionally. A proposal for utility is based on a plural present, one in which we are carved, punctured, yellowed, burned, oxidized, polished, vandalized, and historicized. We are re-constituted as the seamless object, dissociated in singularity. In 0.72AMP ARM, a decommissioned street lamp is splayed open and a typical public vessel is available for contemplation and personal addendum. The artist (re)activates these containers as venues, hosting events both major and minor, macro and micro. From the skin of the infrastructural to the repetition of default bodies, the works offer points of access, exclusion, circulation, appropriation and integration. The two photographic works 18-22a and 18-22b (both 2018), montage sourced images of necklaces, customized flashlights and disembodied self- portraits. These works reiterate the artist’s interest in compiling collections, the cask-ing of parts of parts and binding source materials to themselves in an attempt to file – longingly.