Ian Markell
Born and based in Los Angeles, lan Markell is a multidisciplinary artist whose sculptures, photographs and multimedia works reposition and reconstitute found elements to reframe human experience, typically highlighting his historically loaded material’s subjective past.
His artworks bring together sourced elements, such as archival photographs culled from private collections and public archives, various industrial fabrics, decommissioned mechanical parts and furniture parts among many other materials, which are then transformed through thoughtful assemblage.
Sharing links with the Arte Povera art movement of the late 1960s in its use of socially invested subject matter and everyday materials, Markell’s work takes those materials’ socially situated past lives and connects them with the present.
Formally, his work expands on familiar displays of public infrastructure, weathered or erased culturally coded signage, the human instinct to obsessively archive and collect, as well as queer histories both public and private. Markell has exhibited in numerous galleries in the US and Europe.