ABOUT

Conceived in Russia, born in Ohio, and raised by television, Mark Kelner’s art is often rooted in the refraction of overlapping, if not, competing personal identities.  

It’s a practice that documents and distorts imagery ranging from art history to pop culture, revealing their inherent contradictions as familiar symbols of contemporary life: their false representation of ideas, and as false idols propping up a system of consumerism where things and people are commodities.

His debut series, “Moscow Made, American Born,” (2014) explores his own cultural dualities and the fragmented intersections between ideology and advertising within both Communist and free market systems — a bridge between East/West visual expression. Its point of departure alludes to the visual culture of signs, signifiers, and text-based landscapes that define capitalism and “Americanization” — each opposing and informing the other in our collective worldview.

Later work, including series as varied as “Centennial of the Square,” “Signs & Wonders,” “Solaris,” and “Barcodes” are also emblematic of themes concerning objectification and the relationship between image and facsimile.  With references pulled from modern art masters to mass-produced Soviet propaganda posters, Kelner suggests the viability of creating an alternative art history in an age of alternative facts. 

“If I have a through line to my practice,” says the artist, “it would be an attempt to break down and build back, say, a sculpture or a painting using the most rudimentary of tools and materials (recycled wood, cheap house paint) to best reflect elements of high/low culture, street and Internet visuals, that when slightly twisted, ‘pose’ as fine art.  It’s the idea of pretense that interests me most these days.”

As such, in the crude wake of a post-Covid, post-January 6th reality, claims masquerading as objective truth have so saturated daily life, they have become no more than white noise.  In protest, Kelner attempts to expose their hollowness, exaggerations, misrepresentations, and limits.  The result is a jarring absurdity that inspires viewers to think differently about their world, and to embrace satire, kitsch, and cliché as tools of personal expression.

SHORT BIO

Mark Kelner is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Washington, DC and Brooklyn. 

A graduate of George Mason University, where he studied with the esteemed novelist Vasily Aksyonov, he also trained under Dennis O’Neil at the Hand Print Workshop International. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, and The Times among other media outlets.  His practice centers on the distortion of ubiquitous mass — cigarette labels, oil and gas station logos, fast food signs, and retail culture, among other touchstones.  In 2021, Kelner exhibited his first solo show in Japan titled “Barcodes,” at The Container in Tokyo. A 77 page catalog has been published by the gallery documenting the exhibit and his practice. In 2020, his first museum acquisition was to the Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, as part of their exhibition, “American Dreams.”  In 2019, his solo exhibition “Solaris: Shelter for the Next Cold War,” garnered wide acclaim and over 13,000 visitors.  In 2015, he was a featured guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose concerning the intersection of art, culture, politics, and Russia.  Since then, he has shown at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, Librairie du Globe in Paris and Art Contemporary Los Angeles.  Of note, over the past three years, he has won grants from the National Endowments for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Washington Project for the Arts, the Contemporary Foundation for the Arts, and the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, winning its annual Artist Fellowship Award.  Prior to the art world, he worked with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, coordinating the production of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.  Kelner is the director of over eighteen short films and is currently at work on his latest series, “New American Landscapes,” to be debuted at the American University Museum in September, 2024.