At 10:45pm on June 19, our dear colleague and irreplaceable friend Mark Planisek’s life was taken from us when as a pedestrian, he was struck by a vehicle in a crosswalk near the Clarendon metro station barely an hour after leaving an art opening at the Arlington Arts Center of the collective show Sparkplug: New Work, in which he was exhibiting.

Mark became a part of Sparkplug in 2007, when the group was newly formed, but I have had the privilege of knowing Mark since 2003 as tenant of the Millennium Art Center (MAC) where Mark had the studio above me. Our combined tendency for working late hours was a natural source of bonding. When MAC lost that space it was Mark who found me a space neighboring the new studio he had moved into.

All and all we were studio neighbors for about 5 years and in that time I would enjoy the pleasures of his art, his conversation and eventually his friendship. I would also find him to be an unending resource on the craft of painting, printing and art handling and fierce and resolute advocate for the unsung hero and history of visual art in DC and for welcoming and creating opportunities for those that were new to the scene.

Mark moved to another studio space in early 2007. Missing him as my neighbor in arms, (and in art) later that year I urged him to join our monthly discussions at the DC Art’s Center in the formation of Sparkplug. I know I speak for everyone in the Sparkplug Collective and at DCAC, Mark’s depth of experience and tireless devotion and enthusiasm for his own work and for community building was integral to the powerful start Sparkplug has had these past two years.

I have been told that Mark’s passing was ‘swift and decisive’, yet it leaves the members of our group feeling a gap that will never be filled by any one person with so much skill and sincerity, kindness and humility. As one of our members wrote me, the shock of his death “happened so quickly. I feel like I was just getting to know Mark through my involvement in Sparkplug and feel like I've lost so much because I won't be able to work with him further.” Mark is a legacy of the embodiment of a working artist. He created art works of integrity, works that communicated all the wonder and intensity that were such a part of his personality.

I know my grief at losing Mark, who has done so much for me personally, is just a small, small piece of the collective pain that all the members of Sparkplug are feeling and will have to endure forever following this senseless and tragic loss of someone who was so good. The anguish we are experiencing in the small community he shared with us at DCAC hardly begins to scratch the surface of the loss felt by the entire DC community in which he was so well loved. Our sincere condolences to Anne and to Mark’s family and all his most treasured friends, thank you so much for sharing him with us. Mark truly touched all of our lives and will never be forgotten.

A public memorial is being planned at the Portrait Gallery where Mark was an art handler. The date and time are pending.

Mark's Family has kindly allowed that his collage "16th & K Street NW" remain on view in the show Sparkplug: New Work until August 22nd. The Arlington Art Center has placed a memory book in their Jenkins Community Gallery for anyone that would like to honor Mark Planisek and share their memories of our wonderful times with him.

Karen Joan Topping

SPARKPLUG: New Work

In the Jenkins Community Gallery at the Arlington Arts Center
June 19 - August 22 2009 | Opening Reception: Friday, June 19, 6-9pm | Artists Talk: Wednesday, July 22, 7-9pm

Curated by Lea-Ann Bigelow and Blair Murphy
Featuring painting, drawing, video, photography, and mixtures thereof by
Deborah Carroll Anzinger, Peter Gordon, Mike Matason, Lisa McCarty, Kathryn McDonnell, Mark Planisek, Karen Joan Topping and Jenny Walton

Upcoming Exhibition at the District of Columbia Arts Center
October 16 - November 15, 2009 | Opening Reception: October 16, 7-9pm

for more information about Sparkplug: www.dcartscenter.org/Sparkplug

Below text by curators Lea-Ann Bigelow and Blair Murphy.

Achieving an overall aesthetic can become a high-risk endeavor when I push the material to its perceived limits. – Kathryn McDonnell

Kathryn McDonnell’s vivid paintings flout determinacy. Likewise, Lisa McCarty’s toy camera vignettes are not static transcriptions of times or of places, but rather suggestive, ranging, image-passages – moments en route – polyvalent vibrations captured through what some might deem a throwaway lens. The aesthetic dynamism of these artists’ work owes much, no doubt, to the fluidity and expansiveness of their respective processes. Both artists are open to finding unexpected elements within their work, and downright welcoming to chance effects that fall (just) outside of their creative control; this openness has proven mutually fecund.

Taking a cue from the Expressionist tradition, McDonnell often begins a piece with a direct pour. This initial chaotic spill serves to activate a sequence of material and formal challenges, resolutions and revelations that stem from the temper and flow of the paint, and coalesce to provide each canvas’s inner logic. McDonnell’s colors tend to the elemental, calling up water, blood, air, sun: the colors of connected life. Simultaneously cosmic and worldly, yet in no way world-weary, her paintings also embed insistent patterns that have in some way piqued the artist’s eye, patterns found in nature, architecture, and information technology.

When McCarty, in a conscious reversion/revision of the snapshot-seeking tourist, heads out on a shoot, she is awake and vulnerable; not bent on treating any subject in particular, but ready for her course to be inflected by genuinely felt, precisely heeded instances. For McCarty, there is wonderment in the chance-driven aspects of her explorations. She also revels in the felicitous distortions - light leaks, blurring, uneven saturation - yielded thanks to the Holga’s endearingly flimsy construction. The artist understands the paradoxical potential of this “low-fidelity” hardware, in its concomitant propensity for double-exposure and atmospheric sensitivity, to convey her experiences with heightened faith and veracity.

I am interested in recording the sensation of environments, seeking to be consumed by the conditions of a moment. – Lisa McCarty

The accumulation of fantasy and imagination, memory and hope, or anxiety for the future, are often complex and entangled and not easily described – though they are keenly felt. - Karen Joan Topping

Deborah Carroll Anzinger and Karen Joan Topping examine the relationship between geographic locations, lived environments and identities. Exploring the impact of shifts in time and space on the construction of subjectivity, both artists question linear narratives of identity formation, suggesting that the relationship between past experiences and present identities evades straightforward explanation.

Topping’s work uses games and other markers of childhood to probe the links between the play we undertake as children and our understanding of the world as adults. In Red Light, Green Light, a voice off-camera inserts the chants of a playground pastime into a commute through suburban gridlock. As the viewer is limited to a disoriented, even helpless perspective, the physical environment of the video - the car interior, anonymous traffic and surrounding buildings - becomes claustrophobic, a tightly knit structure dictating the rules of play. Locked into a system, the driver - and the viewer - find their movements dictated to them. The strictures of the lived environment limit possible movements, constructing the driver and the passenger as players in the game whose rules they both follow and enforce by their own involvement.

Memories, thought of as frozen in time, provide a seemingly stable ground for the formation of our current selves. Challenging this assumption of stasis, Anzinger examines the impact shifts in physical location have on memories. Past experiences may become reinterpreted over time, shifting along with changes in environment as our current surroundings seep into our perceptions of the past. Rather than imagining a single direction of influence, with memories and experiences forming a foundation for the development of the self, Anzinger presents the self as the unstable product of an ongoing negotiation between past experiences and present circumstances.

The paintings present themselves as mental maps of memories dispersed over vague and amorphous environments, where the manner in which the impressions of the past occupy the physical space of the present are as important as their provenance. - Deborah Carroll Anzinger

Within my photographic registration, geometric composition, color and texture correlation, I have a very natural, flowing, process. Look. See. Think. Do. – Mark Planisek

In this digitally-enabled era of the mash-up, the combinatorial tactics of collage would seem to spring straight from the zeitgeist. But in contrast to the electronic manipulations of other visual mix-masters, and in league with their Dada/Futur/Constructiv/Cub-ist forbears, Mark Planisek and Peter Gordon have both embraced materially intensive and tactile (re)assemblage techniques. Both artists cut, layer and paste their visions together, then draw and/or paint on top of these constructed surfaces to extend the imagery further and add dimensionality. Collage is notorious for bringing still-recognizable signifiers – fragments excised from the cultural inventory – together in a kind of semiotic collision. The very act of appropriating and rearranging images shakes up our reception of them by liberating them from expected contexts; their placement in sometimes jarring juxtapositions has the power to reinvigorate these images and coax out meanings and energies that might otherwise have remained latent, or inert.

Planisek’s oeuvre spans many mediums, but photography has always been integral to his artistry. With his latest series of hand-painted photomontage boxes, Planisek follows in the footsteps of Bernd and Hilla Becher in his documentation of unsung and fast-deteriorating industrial architecture. His practice and preoccupation veers from the Bechers’, however, in that it is not clinical, but romantic; Planisek lets his camera alight on stairwells, doorways, rear views, windows grown over with vines, junctures which hint at the former life of buildings yet retain some mystery. And in the painstaking (almost archaeologically so) reconstruction of the environments that initially caught his attention, one senses that Planisek is learning to love these spaces all over again.

Their compositional commotion notwithstanding, Gordon’s Going Green works are no magpie compilations – there is economy and keen intent behind each of his selections. Gordon raids newspaper sales inserts, attracted no doubt by the stark literalness of numbers, then undergirds his pieces with these variegated price-tags, which read at once as the building blocks of his renderings of civilization and the particles that contribute to the gathering storm of inputs and outputs. The deer – one of Gordon’s chief protagonists – immediately conjures associations of nature’s majesty, but also of its imperiled state; the beast is fully in our sights, caught in the headlights. All the while, the artist’s exact political stance remains oblique; he dramatizes the relentless churn of the environmental feedback loop in a manner that avoids sentimentality but packs an emotional charge.
In the sounds and movements of natural forms, such as animals, clouds, landscapes, wind, water and sunlight, I find a living source of contemplation.

I am inspired by the harmony, balance and beauty of nature. – Peter Gordon

Through explorations in science, medicine, and the idea of faith I hope to seduce the viewer with events that are beautiful, horrific, and touch the sublime. - Jenny Walton

Jenny Walton and Michael Matason explore corporeal materiality, presenting the body not as the well-protected fortress we often wish it to be, but rather as a flesh and blood incarnation of the tensions between vulnerability and defense, growth and deterioration. The two artists’ aesthetic exploration of the body’s potential for both beauty and decay reflect these paradoxes, searching for the sublime in bodily permeability and destruction. Ф Walton’s work muses on the body’s ability to evoke, simultaneously, both awe and horror. Exploring a diverse array of processes, from painting and printmaking to light installation and photography, Walton flirts with abstraction, transforming imagery culled from anatomy textbooks to create depictions at once recognizable and strange. In Walton’s monotypes, rich blacks create sharp, aggressive, yet exposed forms; the potential threat looks inward as the body’s own defenses turn on it.

Matason’s photographic work explores the relationship, within portraiture, between the photographer, the subject and the viewer. In recent work, the stark presentation of a specific body part - a single finger - couples an abundance of physical detail with a disorienting lack of context. Methodically displayed for the camera (and consequently the viewer), the luscious pink of the flesh and the shiny hardness of the fingernail draw the eye even as the skin’s ruptures unsettle and repulse. In Matason’s images, the ruptures begin in the space where the hard shell of the nail and the soft flesh of the finger connect: the body’s defensive attribute - the nail - creates the very space at which the skin is most easily breached.

My work comes from trying to find an understanding of my actions/habits, which I feel at times I do not have any control over. The photos are a digital record of my behavior, but also focus me to come face-to-face with my psyche. – Mike Matason