Pages from Mark's Notebook
When the plane carrying artist Mark Eisendrath and his family lost power, plunging into the side of a wooded mountain, Mark pulled his mother’s crushed body out of the wreckage, through smoke and fire.
On December 20, it will be 10 years since that event, and fire has and continues to impact Mark’s artistic process. All of the pieces—drawings, paintings, and sculptures—in Mark’s latest exhibition Casting Shadows have been burned intentionally. They literally cast shadows–delicate replications of their burnt shapes on the wall or within the layers that comprise their rich surfaces.
Sculptural Maturity in the natural world (A walk in the woods, Part 1) , an installation of three pieces, suggests treasures a child might find in an autumnal forest, below a carpet of wet, brown leaves. The central feature is a spider web; the surrounding components could be seedpods fallen from ancient trees, waiting for spring.
The most ambitious piece in the exhibition is T-bone’s request, a four-part sculpture/screen. Standing six feet high, its vertical panels hover between representation and abstraction, just a nano-second behind coalescing into recognizable images. Before it, I find myself waiting for a pattern to emerge, a decorative repetition that will connect its parts, but this powerful dark object refuses to submit to my expectations.
Casting Shadows is on-view weekdays or by appointments (email meisendrath@gmail.com) through Dec. 31 at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Meyers Maritime Park’s Herbert Bearman Community Arts Building.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 