Mark Joshua Epstein
Laughing Along with a Lump in my Throat

January 18 - March 15, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18, 5-7 pm

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Matéria is pleased to present Laughing Along with a Lump in my Throat, Mark Joshua Epstein's first solo exhibition in Detroit, including new three-dimensional paintings and works on paper.

 

Epstein's work is driven by a desire to formulate an abstract visual language that is embedded with markers of personal history and cultural identity. The simultaneously discordant and harmonious shapes that play across the surfaces of his work encode reference points drawn from aspects of his Jewish and queer identities, inviting questions about the coordinates where they may intersect.

 

In his current sculptural paintings and works on paper, these entangled shapes are themselves echoes of those that appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish cut paper works. Made with laborious care by both amateur and professional artists, the central texts that they depicted are typically framed by intricate patterned borders, and were displayed in the home as both ornament and talisman. For Epstein, taking inspiration from these works is a reclamation, one that seeks to revive a domestic history that was nearly erased by the Second World War. In responding to their forms, his practice envisions what might have been if once thriving Jewish communities in Europe had stayed intact.

 

A different vernacular of the home–the curvilinear forms of 1980s laminate furnishings–finds its way into Epstein's work through an even more personal link. This same furniture was sold by his Jewish, Polish-born grandfather in the store he co-owned on Long Island. In Epstein's youth, the stylized dressers and desks that were displayed on the shop floor imprinted on him, in all of their pastel, melamine glory, the wares he sold gave shape to young Epstein's dreams of vibrant futures.

 

While these visual elements draw directly on the artist's relationship to biological family and cultural tradition, the visualization of queerness in his work purposely eschews a straightforward correspondence to definitive forms. This stance reflects Epstein's commitment to exploring the inherent complexity of visibility politics through abstraction. The histories of queer and Jewish people alike are shaped by an awareness that obscuring markers of identity in certain situations is essential for survival. Code-switching was, and remains, a vital strategy, and so the colored shapes that cloak these reliefs function in some way as camouflage that conceals their formal and conceptual armatures. Yet at the same time, these very systems of dissemblance can also serve as beacons, as invitations to new home places of refuge, solidarity, and possibility.

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MARK JOSHUA EPSTEIN

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Mark Joshua Epstein received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts (London, UK), and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University (Boston, MA). Selected solo and two-person shows include: Turley Gallery (Hudson, NY), Asya Geisberg Gallery (NY, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NY, NY), Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), Vane Gallery (Newcastle, UK), Demo Project (Springfield, IL), and Biquini Wax Gallery (Mexico City).

 

Selected group shows include: Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Gaa Gallery (Provincetown, MA), Marquee Projects (Bellport, NY), TSA New York (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Arlington, VA), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco (St Louis, MO), Beverly's (New York, NY) and Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA),

 

Epstein has been an artist-in-residence at the British School at Rome (Rome, Italy), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Millay (Austerlitz, NY), Jentel Foundation (Banner, WY), Macdowell (Peterborough, NH), Saltonstall Foundation (Ithaca, NY), and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (Nebraska City, NE), amongst other places. His work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Chronogram, Hyperallergic, Whitewall, Two Coats of Paint, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Dovetail. He is currently a 2024/2025 resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in New York.