About The Work
Born of immigrants, Marc Roder is an immigrant to the core. His move to Canada continues a tradition of “chosen exile”. Perhaps not surprisingly, his work reflects on matters of identity, survival, absurdity — aspects of life in an everyday diaspora. It involves research into inherited narrative structures, a process of simultaneously constructing and collapsing stories while mining their contradictions, not for resolution but for resonance. Everything depicted in them has happened, or will happen — to him, and possibly to you as well. They flirt with disaster. Sometimes disaster flirts back.
His current work can be taken as Vanitas painting, concerned with mortality and the ephemeral nature of beauty. These are stripped-down, non-conforming images, perversely naïve in their polytheism. Objects in collapse — disturbing in their ordinariness, familiar yet unrecognizable — crowd these canvases, where shadows are infused with light, and light infused by darkness.
Marc studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980’s after growing up and starting painting in the San Francisco Bay Area. He then went on to New York City where he worked for John Yau, Dan Hofstadter, and Julian Schnabel in the early 1990’s. The textual sources of the current work’s themes include Carl Jung, Ovid, Shakespeare, John LeCarré, Walt Disney and Homer (the Greek and Simpson). He seems to collect quotations from all over the globe. They stack up on any readily available surface; they are crushed under their own weight; something resembling meaning drips out.
-Persimmon Blackbridge
May 2008
Filed by marc at November 30th, 2006 under Uncategorized
Hey Marcus
Really like the new version of your statement, you pared it down and get right to the heart of the matter. Flows nicely and it illuminates your work greatly for me!
Anne
Comment by Anne — October 8, 2007 @ 12:35 am