Eric N. Mack Never Had A Dream

Never Had A Dream is Eric N. Mack’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, presenting collage works varying from sculpture and installation to wall pieces and work on paper. Mack’s aesthetic involves a particular type of tactility and usage of common items, primarily those related to clothing. References to the fashion industry and the figure impart a seductive quality to his work and connect to identity, or a material fiction of desire and intention.

Readymade elements, such as garments, blankets, pegboards, magazine pages, and grommets are recomposed and transmuted with mediums like acrylic paint, glitter, and dye. Mack’s visual language speaks through these materials, as well as through color and texture, optics and flux. His works flow and shift, alive with a spectrum of hues, irregular shapes, and poetic drama. Threadbare fabrics are fortified at their edges, intermittently adorned and illuminated. For example, A Gift incorporates a bleached oxford shirt, mesh, and silk organza suspended from a microphone stand. These undervalued or over-loved items are effectively reincarnated, and they are as persistent in their new embodiment as they are illogical.

In addition to corporeal concepts, proportion and monumentality combine with overall notions of fragility and loss, as in Mack’s large-scale sculptural installation Tent, a freestanding semi-enclosure, occupying a ten-foot square area of the gallery. This metal tent armature draped with various microfiber blankets and reclaimed quilts, which he embellished with dyes, paints, and coffee grounds, creates a dislocated environment – part shelter, part exposure, part architectural folly. Regardless of scale or dimensional presentation, Mack’s work asserts its own existence, and the illusion of allusion.

Never Had A Dream celebrates a refusal of dream space and escapist theories of projected selfhood to imbibe meaning in the present through touch. Such corporeal expression and formal construction, as a means of understanding, serves in losing old memories and appropriated idealisms for ones constructed in the everyday, through a material questioning – establishing material truths. Setting up a context of softness as externalizations of intimacy. – Eric Mack