Please join us for the opening of MARC SWANSON’s exhibition The Saint at Large at Bellwether on Thursday, February 28th from 6-8 pm. The exhibition will be on view from February 28th-April 5th, 2008.

Featuring “Love is all Around”, a video installation by Marc Swanson and Neil Gust

In The Saint at Large, Marc Swanson’s fourth exhibition with Bellwether, the artist explores the timeless dichotomies of nature/culture, figure/abstraction, high/low, formal/conceptual and the universal/individual. In this new body of work, Swanson shifts from his previous focus on personal folklore to more formal and abstract interests. Materials like glitter and glass remain; compelling themes like nostalgia and the memorial receive further exploration; but when combined with this reduced, almost conceptual visual language, the meanings move away from the concrete and to the transcendental.

During the course of the exhibition, one is met with surprising details and use of materials — an entire wall covered in black glitter, an “animal hide” made of men’s cotton t-shirts and underwear fringed with glimmering gold chains, a paper wasp’s nest hand-fashioned in blown and pulled glass. With disparate references including art history, spirituality, and 20th century gay subculture, Swanson’s allusions combine his own visual language with earnest homages to Kenneth Anger, Eva Hesse, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, SF funk art and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).

“Love is All Around”, a video installation made in collaboration with film editor/musician Neil Gust, fills the project room with dizzying graphic visuals, guitar loops, and abstracted incidental sound that investigate the complicated and exciting sensation of illicit sexual desire. The projected video enveloped in black Plexiglas literally reflects, abstracts, and turns upon itself, furthering Swanson and Gust’s unique, sensuous and immersive world.

Marc Swanson’s work has been at the core of the gallery’s program since it began — this is his fourth solo exhibition at Bellwether. Swanson will also have a solo exhibition at the Cornell University Museum in summer 2008 and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition “Abstract America” at the Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2007, he had an early career survey at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, which traveled to the 21c Museum in Louisville, KY and his first solo international exhibition at Marella Gallery in Milan. In 2005 Swanson had a major installation as part of “Greater New York,” at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.