Mark Newport
sometimes, it doesn’t fit…
May 1 – May 31, 2021

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Matéria in collaboration with Eugenie is pleased to present the installation “sometimes, it doesn’t fit…” by Mark Newport.

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In conjunction with the window installation, on view throughout the month of May, additional works by the artist, presented for the first time in Detroit, are on view in the gallery’s EDITION space. A safe patio event will take place on Saturday, May 22, 6-8 pm.

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“The window installation starts with my first Mends pieces, and combines them with work I am currently doing, weaving together dissected button up shirts. I used details from photographs of three or four of the Mends pieces and collaged them together to make the image on the wall. I imagined this to be a return to the skin and body references of those works, but making intimate scaled gestures public. The change in scale and the ways the image grew made something more regimented and solid, that is then home to or interrupted by organic areas that seem like cellular forms, beings or monsters moving across the undulating grid structure.

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The blue textile hanging on the image comes from dissecting several blue button up shirts that are then sutured together. This object grows from pieces that are pieces made with other shirts that are sewn together. Anywhere there are gaps between the shirt parts, I weave fabric to connect them. In this construction I did no weaving, and instead of trying to make one complete length of cloth, I let the logic of the sewing and piecing of the shirt parts grow into a something that hangs, reaches, tries to encompass, flails a bit, and seems to be surveyed and or considered, by the darker, multi-colored forms on the wall.

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If the blue carries the history of being shirts, it doesn’t fit as a garment any longer. It also seems to be in an ambiguous relationship with the imagery around and behind it.”