Monica Marks Considers Abandonment – Genie Davis
What does it mean to be abandonded? A state of loss, adrift, free? To quote Janis Joplin, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It is with that in mind that viewing Monica Mark‘s compelling installation and individual, but linked works in Abandonded, now at LAAA through the 21st, echoes with an eternal sense of wanderlust and loss, the aching state of the deserted jackrabbit homesteads with which the artist became fascinated traveling through the Mojave’s Wonder Valley, just a few miles past 29 Palms.
Marks says “I’m struck by how these small, weather-beaten cabins seem to hold both the weight of forgotten dreams and a quiet beauty born of survival. Originally built under the 1950s and 1960s Small Tract Act, these structures once represented possibility—a promise of new beginnings in an untamable landscape. Today, they stand as fragile monuments to ambition, disappointment, and endurance.” There’s nothing left to lose, but plenty to be gained in taking in Marks’ conception of these structures.
Shaped around her own beliefs about the history of the sites, her own personal feelings, and the “human condition– the ways we build, collapse, and sometimes rebuild again,” her exhibition is a truly beautiful work that includes the construction of a partial homestead contained within the gallery walls, as well as photography, painting, and found-object assemblage, Marks takes viewers into an immersive world that revolves around memories and loss, the fleeting nature of both human civilization and our secular beings, as well as our resilience and capacity for dreams to come true, or to fail and reincarnate.
Marks states that in these works “The desert itself becomes both subject and collaborator—a place of haunting stillness that contains stories of hope, failure, and transformation…At its core, ABANDONED asks what we leave behind—physically, emotionally, environmentally—and how those remnants shape our sense of self. ”
For the viewer, the installation lifts us beyond the gallery walls and into the realm of great loss, great dreams, and the tattered but still quite present beauty that inhabit each of our hearts.
Into the lonely desert sands we blow, and where the soul stops, only an artist truly knows. Certainly Marks has found this knowledge, felt it, and transmits it here deeply. She believes and beautifully expresses that “To rebuild something that was left behind is to insist that meaning still exists in the fragments.”
For Marks and the viewer, these fragments are both tragic and terrific, a meaningful walk through abandonment, and the hopes, dreams, refuse, and reimagining that remains no matter how far away from our own creations we walk.
Don’t miss the event’s closing on the 21st. LAAA is located at 825 S. La Cienega in West Hollywood.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis
