Duncan Marquiss: Distressed Inventory

Sorcha Dallas is pleased to announce that we are now representing Duncan Marquiss and will present his first solo show in the gallery this month.

This exhibition catalogues a recent period of drawing, a habitual activity that underlines his practice. Many of the works employ frottage as a means of generating composition, using the surface textures of studio detritus and surplus materials - paper off-cuts, masking tape or film leader - to generate marks. Some works waver between representation and abstraction suggesting exploded architecture or shifting landscapes. The artist can literalise these forms by drawing them out or leave it to the mind’s eye to envisage their extent.
In Gallery No. 5 Marquiss presents his most recent film work, which is also concerned with the nature of vision. Prompted by observations of his surroundings Marquiss looks for correlations between the film's subject and the medium itself to determine the structure of the work. 

'The world we see is not the world as it is. Another meaning always exists. Everything threatens to turn into something else, to acquire significance or lose it. The space of representation is not some virtual space behind the projection screen, or caught somehow between the line drawn on a sheet of paper and the vanishing point projected a few feet to one side. It is constructed and exists in our minds. Marquiss’s work investigates this dissociation between image and effect, the power of an imaginative connection to affect or alter the nature of the experience that follows, to change or construct the fabric of history or social reality as a result of the unpredictable processes of human consciousness.'
Will Bradley, 2007