Monya Rowe is very pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mark Schubert titled 55 Gallon. The exhibition, Schubert’s second at the gallery, features three sculptures.

Schubert continues his sculptural practice of using found objects – canoes, metal drums, chrome tables, plastic lawn chairs – to invert the hierarchical relationship between painting and sculpture. He reinvents these discarded objects by slicing and twisting them into polymorphous shapes encased with resin, enamel paint and fiberglass. Precariously resting on the floor and draped with paint in a pseudo-slipshod manner, the work possesses a deliberate kinship to painting.

The formal arrangements temper the aggressive tone of the twisted metal. A 55-gallon metal drum is distorted and shaped into an abstract composition emanating a sense of anxiety, humor and agitation. The materials used here and in past works (plastic lawn ornaments such as penguins and religious figures, coffee-table bases) subversively investigate memory, Americana, and even religion. Familiar objects associated with ones’ environment (the home), family and the past are reconstructed as a form of memory distortion and repression.

Awkwardly possessing an anthropomorphic quality, Schubert’s new sculptures, bursting with movement, exude a destructive component that is part of a bigger picture; each facet of the work – the physicality and the psychology – is broken down, reexamined and retold.