Marc Andre Robinson – The Diachronic
Marc Andre Robinson’s artistic practice revolves around a situated awareness of historical, cultural and familial relations of belonging.
Robinson is interested in historically loaded objects, icons and images. Drawn toward the banal and often discarded furniture of daily life, Robinson distills the hidden power relations embedded within these everyday things. Depriving commonplace objects of their historical innocence, Robinson exposes the historic struggles of race, class, and gender that silently shape their perception. These gestures of desublimation in which we perceive the mechanisms through which the brutal debris of the past is swept into the present, disturbs our sensory habits and forces us to question the routine. Even if temporary, such awareness generates the potential for a critical reappraisal of our surroundings, and the entangled historical and biographical narratives that frame our apprehension.
In The Diachronic exhibition, Robinson provides an installation that addresses desire and loss through references to events that traverse personal and collective memories. The central motif of the exhibition is a toy blue gorilla. As a child Robinson watched this toy mysteriously vanish only to periodically return in other forms throughout the artist’s life.
Like ‘Rosebud’ from the film Citizen Kane, the blue gorilla is a stand-in for the past that is beyond one’s grasp. It casts a spell over the present by inflecting a subject’s awareness with nostalgia and a sense of the uncanny.
Many of the themes within The Diachronic are preparatory sketches for the artist’s first trip to Pretoria and Johannesburg in South Africa. The purpose of this voyage is to visit a suburban golf course in Pretoria where Robinson’s Grandparents family farm once stood, in the hopes of starting a dialogue about the artist’s Afrikaner family history. Robinson has inherited the weight of his family’s history through stories told by the artist’s mother that are augmented by satellite images of the farm found on Google earth. Perhaps the recurring image of the lost gorilla is a kind of cathected petite object that stands in metonymic relation to the family farm and the history of colonialism.
Born in Los Angeles, Robinson earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the LMCC and The Rocktower in Kingston, Jamaica. Robinson has exhibited in the US and abroad at venues including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the Tina Kim Gallery, NY and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. Robinson was awarded an Art Matters grant to travel to South Africa in 2010. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.