Stranger to Stranger
COOPER COLE
Toronto
September 14 - October 14, 2013

Double blind. Mutant mallow smashed and squashed, then toasted until edges curl, blackened. Soggy flap. Fastened, taped, snapped shut, pinched ears and eyelids stuck fast. A mouth pinched into a puckering mask. Face forward. An ‘O’ pulled into an intestinal snake. Stacked and sliced. Hand-rolled stripes. Sitting sidelong. Shoe-bottom snowman scraped free and stretched into pocked, concrete skin. Racy fins. Rock face painted shut with diving board. Matchstick carton camp. Simpering lime. Polite hug.

Jenine Marsh has an interest in sudden stranger-to-stranger encounters, whether person-toperson, or materi- ally, thing-to-thing. Those peering, wary, knee-jerk, face-to-face reactions when mutual unfamiliarity is followed by the silent mechanics of sizing up the other. Even when sense is made, constructed, or reassembled by pulling a shared language out of seemingly thin air, what is unquestionably me, you, this, and that, remains ambiguous and strange. At the intersection of this stumbling, hit-or-miss improvisation of language and the similarly stop-and-start, baffled, burst of decision-making via the studio is where Marsh’s recent work begins.

Marsh’s frontal, facially-oriented facades seem to mimic those nerve-wracking blank spaces where one fumbles to connect with the other. What seems empty, blank-faced, wafer-thin, and trivial are interchangeable with temperature, tone, and half-formed (imagined) recognition. Strings of words are provisional bodies. Material action mimics action in speech. What seems to stick falls flat as perspective shifts.

Physical integrity is elusive and false: a slipped ‘tongue’ sneers independent of its ‘mouth’; a stack of limp, glazed-over sight-lines have no cause to see or feel their shared cylindrical ‘heads’; the mere flip and shift of a mantis-haunch pits prolapse against preen. To speak to, to read with, to speak of... No matter who encounters who via this face-to-face, stranger-to-stranger transmission, someone (or something) is changed.

The matter at hand matters elsewhere. Head, face, mind, ear, entrances and exits are mutually in pieces. Easily rolled up and folded neatly, then smoothed flat, creaking.
-Kim Neudorf

Temperance, 2013. Pine moulding, wood filler, wood glue.
Composure, 2013. Mixed media on plaster, concrete, air dry clay.
Scarecrow, 2013. Flowers, synthetic rubber, steel, garbage can.
Portrait, 2013. Cardboard, plastic tarp, contact cement, latex paint.
The Smokers, 2014. Latex on drywall and wood.
Diz, 2013. Flowers, latex, spray paint.