COVID-19
SaraNoa Mark’s 36° 15’ 43” N 29° 59’ 14” E could be mistaken for an archaeological display. Hung with carved tablets, stacked with rows of inscribed cones, housing a large diorama of cryptic miniatures, it might plausibly represent the neglected backside of Myra, an ancient carved mountain site the artist visited in Turkey. (The show’s title is its geographic location.) The catch is that every sculpture in Goldfinch Gallery was made by Mark, some entirely from scratch, like the clay cones that resemble a type of mosaic from the 4th millennium BCE; others from found materials, like a series of patterned stone reliefs Mark altered only slightly after finding them among industrial remnants. Does that make the exhibit any less archaeological? Materials can never really be raw, even if most humans treat them as such. They contain histories, transformations, intentions, formal properties and data reserves legible to those who carefully excavate, clean, recognize, analyse and restore them. In this show, SaraNoa Mark proves herself a practitioner of just such an art form.
—Lori Waxman 2021-04-02 9:05 PM