SKY ISLAND — Couch in the Desert

Mark Brandvik, *7th Ave / W 56th St, Midtown Manhattan, NYC June 18, 2022,* Digital print on archival matte paper, 2024.

Mark Brandvik, SKY ISLAND at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery

by D.K. Sole

It was important to include the shoreline, he said to me: the place where the beach met the sea. He added that he wasn’t sure why he keeps coming back to the image of a rocket ship taking off. After more than a decade he was still waiting to find out why he was drawn to it. He speculated that maybe it was a stand-in for himself, a person, an upstanding figure in the landscape? (Or maybe not?) The plume of exhaust fumes changes substance from one big unframed photograph to another but the rocket stays the same. A white plastic model. Here it is on a rubbish bin in New York with a column of trash playing the role of the exhaust. Here it is in a frozen landscape and the plume is made of snow. Here it is at one of those important beaches on a pillar of sand. Is the rocket the key thing, or the rocket and the fume? Both. The snow must have been gathered and patted up by the artist, which seems condescending to the rocket: now you get to play at being something that could actually generate this forceful smoke. That artificiality is everywhere—Brandvik never frames the rocket in a way that would make it look like anything other than a model. One of the beach photographs includes part of Cape Canaveral in the background, the real thing, far away across the water.

Mark Brandvik, *SKY ISLAND* at the Donna Beam Gallery. Installation view.

I think he told me he’d been making these photographs since at least 2011. They’re clear, airy, most of them large, printed out like posters and magnetted to the walls. It seems casual: you could roll one up and carry it away. The show includes a gathering of small framed photos from the same series, plus some sculptures, an ambiguous white wall relief, and a video compilation of different projects by the artist—a walkthrough of his 2014 exhibition at the Vast Space Projects warehouse, footage of his 2023 Earth Rise sculpture in Overton, etc. Earth Rise is a steel rocket ship taking off on a bundle of boulderlike forms, and the Vast Space show included a model rocket ship among the sculptures. So yes, consistent rockets. At the Donna Beam there’s a sculpture downstairs that’s a cousin to the Vast Space piece—a screened phone booth terrarium full of shadows and a chilly blue glow with plastic Christmas trees twinkling at the bottom and the rocket rising out of them. It looks mysteriously hallowed and distant, in spite of its actual closeness. The stillness of the model in the photos is more obvious when you see it here, three-dimensionally caught in its cool dim universe, so separated from the bright gallery and the sunshine outside.

Mark Brandvik, *Goldfield, Nevada November 6, 2023*, Digital print on archival matte paper, 2024.

The photographic compositions in themselves seem less important than the fact that we can clearly see the rocket and recognise that it is in a distinct location. Unlike the other “serial object” series I can think of off the top of my head (the Bechers and their industrial structures, Rachel Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle), the photos in SKY ISLAND don't concern themselves with an artist coming to a place and discovering something that was already there. The rockets are in the locations but not of the locations. Even when he brings them indoors, where a model is supposed to be, he puts them in a spot where they feel out-of-place—they’re coming out of a toilet bowl, or going up a chimney at Michelle Quinn’s former gallery on 7th Street.

I think of Sam Davis, another UNLV grad who puts space age things in incongruous landscapes. But in his work they hint at a narrative. How did those aliens get to earth? What are they going to do next? Brandvik has no narrative, the ship is on its own, enacting the action of blasting off. It doesn’t get anywhere. It will never get anywhere. People are generally absent. Even if you try to picture imaginary tiny human beings inside his model machines you have to conclude that he has detached them completely from the earth and everywhere else. The column they’re teetering on lets you know that they’re not going to get down again. Too late for that. The pretend vapour does what it would do in reality: it separates. But at the same time the rocket is still attached, not actually flying free. This is a fantasy of departure.

Mark Brandvik, *Kancagamus Hwy, White Mountains, New Hampshire October 14, 2019*, Digital print on archival matte paper, 2024.

If it’s a stand-in for himself (which is not necessarily the case) then the question arises, why not just use himself? But no, no, no, I think I’ve been too seduced by the idea of the upstanding object visually resembling something. It isn’t a form, it’s an arrested motion, the action of leaving, going somewhere else: the sky, Christmastreeland, the mountain winter of the show’s promotional image. It’s a performer, it’s acting. Repetitions of the image do away with the idea that we’re seeing “a moment of blast off.” It’s clear that the real time represented here is longer than that: he brings the rocket there, he gathers the snow or the sand, he builds a tower, or he carefully sets it up on a pre-constructed smoke plume, then finally the “moment” goes on happening for a while as he walks out of shot, maybe the pedestal of sand or rocks falls over, maybe he has to build it up again. Parodically it happens and goes on happening. The whole show is like that statement of his: he’s waiting to find out what it means, just as the rockets are waiting to find out where they’re going. In the meantime they’ll just stand here. There they are on one coast, on the other coast, at Red Rock, in Amargosa Valley, in a majestic clearing, searching everywhere. No luck yet.

SKY ISLAND is on view at Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery through August 2, 2024.

Artist website

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Australian artist D.K. SOLE lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is the Director of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Published and posted by Lyssa Park on July 10.