Eric N. Mack

Nationale

November 24, 2019 through January 26, 2020

1. Nationale is 50 shirts.

2. Nationale is a brand.

3. Nationale is a body of work.

4. Nationale is a series of paintings that have wrapped themselves into shirts and wandered out into the world in search of their cognates. A world of skies glimpsed through clotheslines and flapping tarps, horizon lines obscured by colored sails, silkworms and spider webs, and galleries with other paintings by the artist projected between their walls. The world is little more than a continuum of textiles and the artist’s paintings are concentration points pulling all of that radiating energy towards their centers. Every Mack painting is every sail and every shirt.

5. Nationale is 50 studio-produced readymades. Fabric dyed and stained, subject to the vicissitudes of the studio floor, then sent off for production into shirts. A limited number of them have been worked again by the artist. In one sense, the shirts are everyday objects, practical and insignificant. And in another, the shirts are armatures for their surfaces; they perform; they signal the presence of the artist in the world.

6. Nationale is 50 tags. The tag is an outline of a thumbprint that defines the perimeter of an acrostic poem of the brand and the artist’s name. It is a drawing affixed to the shirt, the equivalent of the works on paper and found images that he already attaches to his paintings.

7. Nationale is a set of works on paper wheatpasted to the walls and custom racks that read as sculptural extrusions.

8. Nationale is 50 incidental configurations, objects that could just as readily wrap an abandoned gas station at the edge of the Salton Sea as splay themselves between columns in a former power station or dissolve into the flash of color that splits a room of Delft pottery in Brooklyn.

9. Nationale is a set of memories. First a store named Mack’s Discount Clothing on the border of Oxon Hill and Washington DC, then a traveling store on the back of a semitrailer of the same name that two boys rode around inside with their father. When they stopped to open up shop, the boys would often have to rehang the clothing that fell to the floor while they drove. This is an origin myth in the artist’s past where the pile and the hanging rack coexisted in the same space, the same way they do now.

10. Nationale is also National(e). A surrogate middle name with the artist’s first initial dangling from the end. There is the faintest of references to the National Gallery of Art by IM Pei as it exists in the artist’s memory, with its shifting geometries and iridescent exterior.

11. Nationale is a series of duels. A state of mimetic rivalry in which paintings and people struggle to assimilate one another. During an Eric N. Mack exhibition, the shirts are camouflage and wearers are a part of the artworks. On the street, the shirts are the mark of a tribe, 50 pieces adrift in the world that comprise a single, mobile work. An encounter with another wearer is charged with significance. After several years of asking his paintings to take on forms suggestive of bodies in motion and to freeze them, the artist now asks the wearer to reanimate them. The wearer transforms into the artist; the consumer is now the producer and the painting mimics its viewers. Original becomes copy.

12. Nationale is at Jeffrey Stark. 88 East Broadway, #B11 (basement level). Every weekend except Saturday 12/7 and 12/14 respectively, Kwamé Sorrel and/or Chukwumaa Agubokwu will hold court.

13. Nationale is for sale.

*Thank you to Mahfuz Sultan for the words.

press release

close

Past
Contact

Jeffrey Stark

88 East Broadway
Space B11
New York, NY 10002

Leave this field empty if you're human: