Eric N. Mack radically reconsiders the conventions of painting using textiles as his primary materials. For his second exhibition with the gallery, Mack presents new free-standing and wall-based paintings, along with a site-responsive installation. This exhibition, titled after a text by the artist quoted in full below, follows recent one-person exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, as well as residencies at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, and BOFFO, Fire Island, New York.

Both invoking and disrupting the flat pictorial plane, Mack’s abstract compositions occupy space in ways that challenge traditional understandings of painting. The works may be wall-based, wrapped around a metal stretcher (the traditional support for canvas), or pinned directly to the wall, but they may also extend freely into architectural space. Influenced by the expansion of painting into environmental installations by artists such as Sam Gilliam, Robert Rauschenberg, and Christo and Jean-Claude, Mack extends their legacy through a contemporary lens. Using textiles rife with fashion and cultural references, Mack incorporates new and vintage materials in a range of textures, colors and weights. These richly layered pieces move between opposing conditions: movement and stillness, transparency and opacity, volume and flatness, monochrome and pattern.

Mack’s ongoing exploration of materiality and composition begins with the pliability of fabric. Using textiles and garments drawn from his personal archive, sourced from fabric and thrift stores, he cuts, rips, dyes, sews, glues and pins the materials into new configurations. Their original forms become obscured, while their distinctive material qualities remain legible. This tension between recognition and abstraction is central to Mack’s practice, which he describes through the injunction to “turn your back to the lens as a gesture to abstract one’s own form.”

In the exhibition, these altered materials encounter sleek stainless steel custom armatures that Mack describes as “hybrid readymade structures.” Elsewhere, suspended textiles hover, fold, and drift from the walls and ceilings as staged interventions in the gallery’s architecture. In the center of the gallery, sheer mesh and printed fabric descend from the ceiling, disrupting sightlines and prompting movement through the space, as Mack choreographs the viewer’s interaction with his work. Through their multi-dimensionality, the works resist a single, comprehensive perspective: as one aspect comes into view, another is inevitably concealed.

You Red the Shirt Off My Back
By Eric N. Mack

Turn your back to the lens as a gesture to abstract one’s own form. 
An exacting gaze is withdrawn. What’s left is a number on a jersey. 

It becomes an utterance, not a name you choose for yourself.
It is a brand, not your family’s name.
Embraced through the power of fashion as if it were my own grand indulgence.

The little blurb in a fashion magazine detailing the clothes in the picture—Barthes called that “written clothing”—is prose from a spring/summer fashion magazine matching the legibility of abstraction. It details the garments, their origin, and who wears them, and also speaks to the aesthetic intention. Thematically, an undercurrent of desire for something new has been realized.
There are gestures of wear and marks of use with light dust that show the work is real and operating in a present space.

Yet every day I wake up, get dressed, and walk down the street as a walking billboard. Often I regret it. The avenue is a runway. You make your own brand deals, exalt and defy them with each step. High on the flagpole but ready to burn.

Maybe the works should be anointed with acrylics. 
A dab on each wrist, a spray at the neck. Aromas added where the light doesn't shine.
Do you know the difference between a dab and a daub?

I see a young mother in her Sunday's best, a pink tennis skirt, matching pink mules, her hair slicked down, bleached to brown and then copper. I never see her face. My pacing is right behind her. Her shoes clack down the street with her baby in her arms. The babe had been crying, with his Afro out, blue sporty shirt for boys; she whispered in his ear to calm him. He looks at me curiously, doing two things at once.

Only to be half visible, because you realize they can only see your back.