September 1 - October 21, 2007
http://www.mutatovisual.com/html/reports/calstate0 | see press
Also shown at the CSUF Main Gallery
CSUF GRAND CENTRAL ART CENTER
125 N. Broadway Santa Ana, CA 92701
This exhibition features more than 400 photographic works by the artist in the Project Room Gallery. A 288-page hardcover book Beautiful Mutants published by Grand Central Press and designed by Ryan DiDonato will be released at the opening.
Nike SB, The City of Glendora California, Mutato Muzika and CSU Fullerton and the Grand Central Art Center came together to make this exhibition and book possible.
Mark Mothersbaugh was born in 1950 in Akron, Ohio. In 1957 he received his first pair of spectacles and simultaneously became interested in art. In 1968 he enrolled at Kent State University fine arts department. In 1970 Mothersbaugh protests the war in Viet Nam and meets Jerry Casale at Kent State and co-conceptualizes the art band DEVO. Mothersbaugh has his first solo gallery show in 1975. From 1976 to present, Bob, Jim and Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob and Jerry Casale release award winning short film "In the Beginning was the End - the Truth About De-evolution" and European chart topping singles. During this time period, Mothersbaugh created along with Jerry Casale and Bob Mothersbaugh all of Devo's film, graphics, music and stage shows. DEVO continues to record and perform. From 1984 to present, Mothersbaugh has been composing music for film, TV, radio, video games and the web. Since 1987 Mothersbaugh has shown in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions.
The photo-image manipulation of The Beautiful Mutants were intended to be a form of palindromic poetry, where a story is created by a half-truth folded and placed next to itself, thereby creating a self-referencing, yet completed visual poem.
- Mark Mothersbaugh
Mark Mothersbaugh's art leads the viewer to see the hidden mutant in us all. The artist renders a "study of humans via symmetry using photos, both recent and vintage" in which each photograph is, like the "self" in Jungian analysis, transformed to "emerge from its chrysalis as something with expected and uninvestigated properties. It no longer represented anything immediately known... Rather, it now appeared in a double guise, as both known and unknown."
Viewers resonate with these images at the interstice between individual subconscious and collective unconscious. Mothersbaugh is, indeed, a master of this interstice, offering the potential "miraculous" experience that art can provide. As Gombrich describes it, "the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master, the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind-if only we know...how to use our eyes."
- from the essay The Cryptomnesia of Mark Mothersbaugh: Beautiful Mutants in Einfall and Shado by Cristina Bodinger-deUriarte