Marcus Cain

Marcus Cain is a resident of Kansas City, MO and Manager of Operations and Communication at the Kansas City Art Institute H&R Block Artspace.  He is recipient of a Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award Fellowship in 2012.  His work is part of several public collections including Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Sprint Corporation, Overland Park, KS; and American Century Investments, Kansas City, MO. Artist Statement  "For me, painting is an act of quiet and slow resistance to a hyperactive world and a filter for the constant bombardment of an accelerating Information Age.  I construct images for that narrow delay between sight and perception ó a territory between looking and seeing ó where color and texture are in the service of gestures that may alternately serve as both subject and verb.  In these latest works, I employ humble organizing lines and signs not unlike tally and slash marks, hashtags and dashes that have been freed from their conformity in charts, ledgers, the Internet and written language. I use them instead to divide space, weave color and suggest densities of shadow, light, movement, weight, gravity, atmosphere and other aspects of our elemental world. These incremental stitches of paint are applied by dipping pieces of wood into pigment and stamping surfaces with repeated gestures that imply a directional brush stroke. Through this application, I appeal to the eyeís saccadic movements to detect and read patterns by creating disruptions or breaks within accumulated marks that may not always reconcile as form. My paintings represent a visual conversation between fragmentation, compression and alignment of (mostly shallow) illusionistic spaces. My intent is to un-focus the viewerís eye and suspend it in a state of visual vibration ó to induce a semi-meditative state of contemplation and the synesthetic experience of a feeling gaze upon tactile paintings. Content within these alignments represents a high-low bridge between the origins of a quotidian Midwest American childhood and narratives abstracted from adult interests in biological perception, language, memory and the presence/absence of the figure and its attendant identities. Collectively these works are meditations on personal and universal mythologies, acts of transformation and discovery and loss in the natural and man-made world."