Larissa Goldston Gallery is pleased to present MONSTR, the gallery’s third solo exhibition of works by Mark Fox. The installation-based exhibition including large cut-paper works, video and cut-steel, will be on view from Friday, May 14 through Saturday, June 26. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, May 14 from 6 to 8 pm.

In this exhibition Fox continues his study of various religious and mythological texts that describe accepted truths. His process of copying, cutting and reassembling these texts recalls the monastic production of illuminated manuscripts in the use of materials – paper, ink, gold leaf – as well as in the act of transcription. “By taking a razor to these transcribed doctrines, I am seeking to examine the edges of these dogmas; to scrutinize the ways in which their meaning and implications underpin contemporary culture.” Deep Gray See, a massive cascade of cut paper suspended from a 70s-era gilded school desk, draws on Papal edicts and Fox’s childhood reverence for Star Trek. By intertwining Captain Kirk’s galactic records with the Constitution of Divine Revelation, the original meanings of these “authoritative” texts are obscured and new associations emerge through their juxtaposition.

Further exploring his interest in transcribing texts, Fox presents a new body of mirrored stainless steel work. The diptych of cut-steel blends obscure anatomical facts with familiar idioms about the body. The reflective surfaces, consisting of equal parts positive and negative space, conflate the area behind – a staging of his recollections of an undercroft sacristy – and in front of the mirrors. The result is an optical effect whereby the viewer’s eye organizes the fragmented visual field, including the viewer’s own reflection, into a unified image.

As with his combination of high church doctrine and pop television icons in Deep Gray See, Fox pits the “authentic” against the “artificial” throughout the exhibit. This concept extends to the two videos on view. In one, Fox collaborates with choreographer Ryan Kelly to recreate a scene of prison violence involving an incarcerated priest; this interpretation is paired with original footage from the prison’s surveillance camera.

Throughout the gallery, Fox places a series of colorful antler-like paper constructions that protrude from the walls. Suspended within this entropic arrangement is Deep Field Nancy, a three-dimensional paper work comprised of hundreds of ink drops cut and reassembled into a sculptural form suggesting both earthly topography and the astral bodies of deep space.

Also on view is Fox’s multimedia sculpture Binding Force, which appears on the cover of the new album High Violet by The National to be released from 4AD Records on May 11.

Mark Fox received his MFA degree from Stanford University and holds a BFA degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He currently lives and works in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Rice Gallery at Rice University, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University and the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. His work was recently acquired and exhibited by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and has also entered the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American art, among other institutions. Recent articles on Fox have appeared in ART + AUCTION, The New York Times, Houston Press, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, and Corriere della Sera Io Donna. Fox was recently chosen for The Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program at Giverny for 2010.