Martos Gallery opens tonight at its new location in Chinatown with Invisible Man, a group presentation featuring new works by Torkwase Dyson, Kayode Ojo, Pope.L, and Jessica Vaughn.
Invisible Man reflects on how bodies use, manipulate and move through their given environments, and transforms the gallery into a temporary home for invisible bodies.
The objects in this show combine the found, fabricated and refurbished, and change some of the rules of fixed systems:
Torkwase Dyson’s large scale white-on-white paintings are only seemingly abstract. They operate as a kind of legend with hidden demographic and geographic references, while still trying to maintain some material anonymity; Pope.L turns water upside down and on its side. You are not permitted to drink from this fountain, or from these glasses. You can look, thirstily, from afar; Kayode Ojo’s velvet couch stands on its side draped with a sequins gown. You can’t sit on it. But someone has left their mark, giving the sense that it is no longer used but not quite thrown away; Jessica Vaughn’s site-specific wall installation of Chicago public transportation seats simulate an improvised figuration of a typically predetermined urban common ground.
Invisible Man is titled after Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like to bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

Opening reception: Wednesday May 3, 6 - 8pm

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