Artist Wendy Mark and design firm AGENCY collaborate in ,,,ON Cloud 9, a whimsical video work currently being shown at the Pas De Calais boutique in the Soho district of New York. Here art, design and fashion meet.
Mark, an artist known for her color saturated monotypes, delivers an enticing work that offers thoughtful pauses and moments of discovery. AGENCY reinterprets the artist’s work by means of looping digital animation records, a custom scripted image sampling process, which progressively scans Mark’s paintings, translating values in the image into a series of geometric fields. Starting with a 3×3 grid, each iterative scan increases in density, producing precisely stippled pointillist grids which progressively approach the resolution and depth of the original artwork. As the scans approach full resolution, the original artwork is briefly exposed, before dissolving again into the 3×3 grid. The technical vision of the digital processing paradoxically gives a new life to the subjects it scans – trees and clouds seem to shake, float, and vibrate, newly animated by their supposedly objective observer.
This collaboration underscores Mark’s interest in working with other artists (past projects include work with poets such as Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Paul Muldoon and writers Adam Gopnik, Louis Menand and Javier Marias). Her latest project Untitled (Triptych), published by Stinehour in an edition of 150, will be available in the spring of 2017. The book will include a poem by the recent MacArthur fellowship recipient, Ben Lerner, with monotypes by Wendy Mark.