The London Open 2015

The Whitechapel Gallery

Catalogue text by Daniel F.Herrmann

The absorbing collages of Mark Harris salvage utopian thought from the forgotten pages of history. The artist uses old library books as his source material abandoned, discarded and rejected repositories of knowledge and ideologies that have been surpassed by new editions, approaches and interests. From these books, Harris creates glimpses into new worlds and onto new ideas. Repurposing the cast-off materials of the past, he rekindles our interest in alternative ways of looking at the future.

Harris cuts out geometric shapes from the pages and photographs of book illustrations - often simple triangles, squares or rhombuses, Again and again they depict architectural features, sometimes entire buildings, recalling the past promises of planned environments. Harris re-arranges the architectonic forms, excising them from their historic context and re-framing them in a midst a landscape of scattered shards and cut-outs. The crystalline structures that surround his concrete buildings nod towards expressionist architecture of the early 1920’s, an alternative modernism sometimes forgotten today.

By converting the images into shapes and patterns, Harris retains the historic atmosphere of his source material but transforms them into different forms and content. His works from the Continuous State series are imagined schemes of social and political orders often presented on angled structures evoking ideas of possible future proposal.

Catalogue text by Daniel F.Herrmann