SEPTEMBER 19th - NOVEMBER 10th 2020

M. LeBlanc is pleased to present FORSAKEN STATES by Mark Verabioff - the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Chicago and at M. LeBlanc.

Prior to his move to Los Angeles in 2001, Mark Verabioff lived and worked for the greater part of a decade in New York, where he regularly performed “guerrilla actions” in public spaces, alongside screenings of seminal single-channel videotapes in galleries throughout the city. In large part, Verabioff’s activities were aligned with the artist’s own brand of “cultural insurgency,” which he has continued to develop in his practice as an antagonism toward the dominant structures of power that continue to flourish in the field of contemporary art. Identifying with a generation of socially minded artists who came to maturity in the 1990s amid racial and gender politics, activism and art around the AIDS crisis, and a widespread distrust of institutions, Verabioff often reuses materials and sources from art history and popular culture to provoke a response through the lens of feminist discourse with a queer eye.

"Subverting right wing conspiracy theories, pop culture memes, and cultural hierarchies of high versus low, Mark Verabioff’s latest exhibition, FORSAKEN STATES, is the perfect foil for our deeply troubled times. In the three large-scale collage paintings and floor decal on view, the artist’s signature mix of appropriated text and imagery concocts an absurdist, equivocal vision of America where “gouty Karens and Kens”, hunky models, white trash antiheroines, and queer patricians hold sway.” — Jane Ursula Harris

LINKS

Full text by Jane Ursula Harris - The Specter of What’s to Come: Mark Verabioff’s FORSAKEN STATES

Curriculum Vitae

Mark Verabioff (b. 1963 Kingston, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions include: Poolside-Drive by, team (bungalow), Los Angeles (2019); TEARS, team (gallery), New York (2018); CIVIL PISS WAR, The Pit, Los Angeles (2017); Mark Verabioff: Seminal Videotapes 1984-1992, 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles (2014); Crack Attack, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2012). Selected group exhibitions include: Pathologically Social, O-Town House, Los Angeles (forthcoming 2020); Scenes of the American Landscape, team (gallery), New York (2019); ANNUNCIATIONS, M. LeBlanc, Chicago (2018); Made In L.A. 2016: a, the, through, only, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). Selected performances include: BURY THE BODY: Amanda Ross-Ho & Mark Verabioff, team (bungalow), Los Angeles (2019); Breakdown, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013). Public Collections include: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland; Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, Santa Monica. Awards include: Relief Fund for L.A. County Visual Artists, The Getty Foundation (2020); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018). Verabioff studied Intermedia at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and The Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada.