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How busy are you? I guarantee you that, no matter how much that may be, Brooklyn-based, new media artist, Mark Skwarek, is busier.
Mark S. in a quiet moment at Devotion Gallery, Billyburg
Not only does Skwarek teach 3-D gaming at NYU Polytech and pursue his own artistic career, the 33-year-old Bushwick native has also curated and participated in exhibitions across the globe that employ an amazing bleeding-edge technology called AR—augmented reality.
Photos courtesy Pierogi Gallery
People like to dwell on an artist’s untimely death. Somehow, asking unanswerable questions like “why” are easier than looking at the “what”—the work that’s survived them—and figuring out what it means to us now, what its legacy is.
Enter Pierogi Gallery today, however, and you’ll find that some strong (and heartfelt) curatorial light is being shed, on the late Mark Lombardi’s work, on Mark Lombardi the man, and the incredible and amazing (optimistic!) vibe his legacy has in store.
There’s a sadness in the neighborhood today, an empty space; it used to be filled by a wonderful photographer and courageous person named Meredith Allen who passed away on March 17th.
"Sugar Tales #6 (ears)" 2000
You can’t help but be captivated by the sense of imagination and bravura use of color in her playful, soulful, funny/sad pictures.
Ward Shelley’s “Williamsburg Timeline Drawing,” 2002, serigraph.
Larry Walczak has seen a whole lotta changes in Williamsburg’s gallery scene since he arrived here in 1994. Eyewash—the gallery he ran with the late Annie Herron from 1998 to 2002 on Williamsburg’s Northside—gave first starts to a host of local talents: Bruce Pearson, Eric Heist, Angela Wyman, Adam Simon, Ward Shelley, Greg Stone, David Kramer, David Brody… Recognize them? If not, you ought.
They were the artists who lived and worked here in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s who laid the foundations of today’s bustling scene. This month he’s opening an ambitious and utterly subjective exhibition called “Williamsburg2000” in which he alternately waxes nostalgic and gets his inner activist on. On tap will be 50+ artists he’s worked with at eyewash over the years, first on North 7th Street, and later in places far and wide—after the Buildings Department closed eyewash and he transformed it into a “migratory gallery.”
Marieke Wegener (in her Williamsburg studio) began interviewing many area artists this summer for her documentary about the artist Mark Lombardi who allegedly died of suicide in 2000. Photography by Ben Lozovsky
Mareike Wegener is a 27-year-old German filmmaker with spot-on taste for the obscure, the quirky, the hard to pin down—particularly when it comes to visual artists. What’s more, she’s got a sweetly fierce determination to follow her instincts to their fascinating, if open-ended, conclusions. While in school in Cologne, Germany, Wegener managed, over the course of four years, to fund and produce a film on the late Al Hansen (wandering conceptual artist extraordinaire, member of the transgressive art movement Fluxus, and otherwise known as Beck’s grandfather). Now she’s hard at work on an even edgier project, but one much closer to home: a documentary on the late, great artist Mark Lombardi, who died at the young age of 49 (suicide) in his Williamsburg studio in 1999. Local gallery, Pierogi, handles his estate: epic drawings that are, at first glance, little more than diagrams in pencil on paper, but which ultimately claim to chart the scandal-riddled courses and interconnected destinies of political movements, presidents past and seated, political parties, world banks, and, most frightening of all, terrorism. Controversy has followed the work since Lombardi’s death, and the FBI is even rumored to have closely scanned one work in particular in the wake of the events of 9/11. Wegener, meantime, is spending the better part of this and last year sorting out the legacy and history of Lombardi, the man—a task that no filmmaker, until now, has dared to take on for its complexity. It’s a project that’s made her a de-facto W’burg resident.
Late mornings you can find her smoking hand-rolled cigarettes on Bedford Avenue, drinking lots and lots of coffee. Jittery, but better for it, we did the same. What ensued was a conversation that, much like a Lombardi drawing, was full of fragments of interconnected lives, open-ended answers, and some beautiful insights into what makes the creative mind tick.
