Mark Mullin
"Mark Mullin" by Chris Cran, Summer 2010, p. 120
With its inverted, stormy earth/sky proposition in the thinnest guise of an energetic abstract painting (and there is nothing here to say that it is not an abstract painting), I…wait a minute, isn’t that a face? Isn’t that a room? Sensuous passageways open onto smoky layers of space, and before I know it I am held in a delicious suspension for I don’t know how long. Eventually I alight on a miniature backlit street scene that transforms into a “Kilroy was here” moment, a tiny graffiti of flat woven brush strokes that floats on the surface and seems to observe the vast space, just as I am doing. I recall Hudson River School paintings and postcards from the 1950s, with their surrogate viewers gazing at the sublime, and I am brought back to my body. I am in a gallery in front of a painting. Space, space, space. There is no accounting for it.
Chris Cran is a Calgary-based artist and writer. Mark Mullin is a Calgary artist who teaches at the Alberta College of Art and Design; his exhibition “fictitious device” was on view at Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary between September 12 and October 12, 2009.
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