Mark Soltero
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga exhibiting artist
Fragmentary View Of The Projection Room (2018) Acrylic on Wool 1900x1500mm
My work is situated in reference to my personal history and the cultural and political landscape of the Postmodernist period. The late 70’s was a formative period for me, there was a revolution taking place in the film industry that would make a significant impact on the wider visual culture. The etymology of cinéma translates literally as the drawing of movement. Theatres are containers of images and collective memory. The Silver screen is like a mirror, reflecting traces of visual culture back to the consumers of that culture.
The tension between figure and ground is problematised and referents are made to camouflage in works that explore our experience of différance, in time – examining relationships between image, memory and materiality, bordering on dissolution, fragmenting or breaking down in contrast to the seemingly smooth images that saturate our lived experience.
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga 2020
Two Skulls (2020) Acrylic on Hahn Bamboo, 500x650mm
The coordinates I was given immediately made me think of being pulled or reaching out in both directions and it was only much later that it occurred to me I hadn’t considered the image as a flow from left to right or vice versa.
I’ve been working with the image of the skull as a memento mori for several months now and wanted to see if I could think of some way that could work with the coordinates. Because I’d initially conceived of reaching out or being pulled out from both left and right sides, I thought of two skulls rather than one. The coordinates and other constraints such as limits at the edges of the paper, dictated that one skull be larger and one smaller. They’re in a tight confined space with each other but at the same time they’re being pulled from their respective coordinates. Light surrounds them from all sides.