Mel Kendrick | Marker #2 | 2009

Since the early 1970s, American artist Mel Kendrick has been cutting into, slicing off and boring through pieces of wood to create roughly elegant sculptures. While known primarily for his charming, fragmented wood sculptures, Kendrick has used drawing and printmaking to explore the interactions of negative and positive space. In the 1980s Kendrick began making bronze casts from existing carved or deconstructed works to continue his experimentation with ways to take apart and re-create space. 

In his Marker series, his first large-scale works in concrete begun in 2009, Kendrick uses concrete to build architectural monuments. While the emphatic black and white banding seems decorative for the artist, in fact the striations follow a long tradition of architectural marking that dates back to the Roman era, was used in medieval Italian church architecture and erupts again in the post-modern work of architects such as Mario Botta. 

It is in the Marker series where we see Kendrick’s interest in architecture and the built environment most clearly. The scale of these works hover between body and building, between heavy and light, between horizontal and vertical. The banding anchors the works to the street, with the perforations and apertures allow us to see the sky through the work. Like a giant Rubik’s cube, Marker #2 encourages us to twist the shapes in our minds, rotating them around their central core, sliding the parts back into place. Kendrick evokes our experience of walking through the city, where each layer of building façade, billboard and signage stacks upon one another, making and unmaking the visual environment through which we move.