INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

MARIANNE VITALE
On the One

May 18 – June 24, 2018

Reception
Friday, May 18, 6-8pm

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is proud to present Marianne Vitale’s On the One, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Dredged from a waste land of deactivated industrial components, exhumed railway supports serve as over-signifying omens and bellwethers. A housing bracket once pressed into the front end of a locomotive, dislodged from its iron horse assumes the form of a skull. Flange way blocks rest underneath track work, never to see the light of day. Uprooted, the cast forms stack syntactically as totems of language. Further excavation of once-operative accessories – in this case, guard plates, braces, switch clips and guide brackets – yields a recognition of the human guise in functional design; serving here as anthropomorphic devotees or ritual death masks for an encyclopedic museum. Initially meant to resist surface-cracking and fatigue, the works transgress their original use value as forms of support: hinges, underpinnings, and receptacles of American infrastructure. They have been rendered prophecies of what becomes of the grave overshoot and overspread, legitimated by the relentlessly regurgitated ideal of manifest destiny.

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Marianne Vitale (b. 1973) graduated from the School of Visual Arts, NYC (1996). Recent projects include a solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2017); INVISIBLE-EXPORTS (2016); Venus, Los Angeles (2016); Karma, New York (2015); The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2013); works featured on Chelsea’s High Line, New York (2014); and large-scale commissions for Frieze NY and Performa NY (2013). Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, White Columns, the Brooklyn Museum, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Art Institute, the Aldrich Museum; and international venues such as Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; Le Confort Moderne, France; Tensta Konsthall, Sweden; UKS, Norway; and Contemporary Art Center of Vilnius, Lithuania. Recent publications include From Here to Nowhere, Karma, NY; Oh, Don’t Ask Why, CFA, Berlin; These Things Are Hard To Say, Yogurt Boys Press, NY; Lost Marbles, Editions Lutanie, Paris; and Train Wreck, Kitto San, New York.

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