A Mark Powell inspired piece. Using biro

Result #1

ikewares and digital photography, Powell crafted a fake woman in an array of styles and settings, and using a variety of materials and methods (printed, drawn, and painted) he created a grotesque female figure with a multitude of body parts and an array of facial features, all bearing the marks of his long, seductive brushstrokes. While Powell is not one to shy away from the dangers of these sorts of works, his entry into the genre was to rely on a process that is, perhaps, too contrived and influenced by the imagination to be truly authentic.The main problem Powell faces in his attempt to break into the mainstream is that his work is too constrained by its own capability as a performer to transcend its role as an allegory for the formation of sexuality. Instead, the work becomes a pathetic and tired exercise in which Powell attempts to create a new kind of sexuality by playing with the conventions and possibilities of performance. This is an attempt at something that is so often bound up with a style and an identity, one that involves an act of making the self visible, but in which Powell has fallen short of that goal and seems content to merely make the most effective art out of a style that is already stale.

Result #2

A Mark Powell inspired piece. Using biro vernacular, a highly variable image, and a life-size head and torso, he reproduced a photograph of himself as a young man in his teens. In this self-portrait, he appears nude, hand raised as if to show his papers. His face is split in half, and his upper body is broken and torn to the neck. His lower half is covered with a sheet of paper and a splotch of ink and a fragment of his head. His features are in stark contrast to his craggy, rugged torso, and his hands are cut off, almost to the point of being threatening. The background is an alternating row of sheets of paper showing the face of the artist in various states of disrepair and disfigurement. In a few areas, the artist faces the camera directly and in others, he turns his back to the viewer. Yet all the artists features are visible and the head is obscured, leaving the torso only faintly visible. The mannerism of the work is reminiscent of the work of Joyce Pensato, but with a difference: Pensatos photographs are always on the verge of being unreadable, but Powell makes them readable.The third work, an oil on canvas, shows the artist at his best, taking a photograph of himself and half of his body in a pose of tightrope walking across a bridge, which is more revealing of the artist than any of the other works. The figure is nude, but has a wide slit at the neck which ends in a thonged stockings. The figure is as distanced from the viewer as from the artist. He is depicted as a man in a short, green coat, standing before a bridge, and holding a camera. The title, Statues, is also the name of the work, and is attached to a mirror; the mirror also doubles as a figure in the painting, standing next to a female torso.

Result #3

A Mark Powell inspired piece. Using biro vernacular materials, such as kitchen scraps and old wallpaper, Powell constructed a small wooden frame in the shape of an Erector Set with a Straw. The work consists of a wooden plank, a few pieces of wood, and a small little wicker chair. The bottom of the plank is painted a solid black, and the top is painted a dirty white. A view from above is rendered in the shape of a bowl with a straw sticking out. The scene is composed of two shelves that open up to reveal a single, small, and empty window. The small display case is filled with a few of the kitchen scraps that Powell found in the trash. There are also six large drawings that depict various furniture—curtains, shelves, and desks—and a series of white paper cups.The pieces have a very intimate scale; the view from above is never complete. The space is restricted to a few in a small room; the objects are too small, and the perspective is distorted. But the staging of the objects and their placement in the space makes them more concrete and tangible, and the pieces more individual. The images become more picturesque, the viewer is attracted to the objects as if they were part of a dramatic setting, and he or she moves closer and closer to each one. The objects are not only small, but also are a reflection of the world of objects, and thus of a place.This new form of formalism is not new to Powell. He has worked with the same materials for many years. His pieces are more traditional than most, they are not about the final product; they are not mere kitsch. The work is about the transformation of ordinary objects into art, and the transformation of the ordinary into art. The works are not about the creation of something that will remain a product to be sold, but about the transformation of objects that have remained in the realm of chance into art.

Result #4

vernacular materials, Powell offers a small version of a mini-retrospective of the artists work, featuring drawings and constructions. His clear lines, based on drawings and sculpture, can be read as an extension of the figures, which he started as sketches and then transformed into paintings. The simplicity and lack of an explicit message give the drawings a sense of timelessness. Powell is known for his incisive analysis and his relationship with his materials. His work has always been about the appropriation of the everyday, and it is at once original and quotational. These works have a contemporary quality, which is typical of Powell, and they are the work of an artist who has been here for a long time and who has developed a style based on a classical esthetic.

Result #5

vernacular materials—glue, canvas, paint, paper, tin, and wire—he combined a wide range of contemporary visual symbols with a few of the more obscure: an image of a human skull with the word (another) skull superimposed on it. In this piece, Powell demonstrated that painting can be a means to a end and not just an end. With a close reading of this piece, one could detect Powells attempt to synthesize and rethink ideas about representation.While Powells work seemed to come out of a place of defiant identification with art, the fact that it came from a place of diverse exploration suggested that it was something more than an art project. This work, then, was a visual statement that was not so much a statement, but something that had to be made. One can easily see how a piece like Malevichs Black Square, 1933–34, came to represent a new form of art, but it could also have been a symbolic or symbolic statement that reflected on the meaninglessness of all attempts at artistic expression.