“My drawings told me they had to be sewn, and not by hand. I would have to buy a sewing machine and learn to generate and control a sewn line. It might as well have been the voice of God.”
—China Marks
Lucid Perturbations brings together over 200 artworks from China Marks’s sewn oeuvre, offering the broadest survey of the artist’s surreal tableaux to date. Pivoting at age fifty-nine from a career as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Marks began sewing in 2000, producing over 600 sewn works in the last twenty-two years of her artistic career, including large collaged tapestries, drastically altered jacquard painting reproductions, broadsides of embroidered text, small and medium-sized sewn drawings, and sewn books. The tremendous body of work that comprises Lucid Perturbations reveals the depth of Marks’s artistic psyche and the range of her intuitive responses to the travesties and phenomena of our world; the dynamics of power; and the tragicomedy and psychology of human relationships. With her nose six inches from her industrial sewing machine, Marks spent the last years of her active artistic life sewing together the many joys, sorrows, and contradictions of life into emotionally resonant, if not beautifully bizarre, scenes that are at once uncomfortably familiar and impenetrably cryptic. They are the many worlds of Marks’s singular, and up until now, predominantly private universe.
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, in partnership with Marks’s long-time friend, Pamela Matsuda-Dunn, and the China Marks estate, is honored to present this expansive exhibition in what is the gallery’s first monographic exhibition to occupy the entire building in its twenty-one-year history.
Accompanying the exhibition is the catalogue, Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks, designed by Anne Finkelstein and featuring an essay by Carina Evangelista, a biography by Pamela Matsuda-Dunn, and photography by Jeffrey Scott French for the illustrated plates of all of Marks’s books and broadsides.
