Mark Von Schlegell

A True Story

Venusia

Andro Wekua

Daniel Feinberg

Augusta Joyce

Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history.Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.This book features the text Sebastapolis (Interview with A.) by cultural critic and science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell. Images of new works from the artist's 2012 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery include large colourful abstractions, as well as Wekua's signature collages and portraits.

Dreaming Dreaming

It is 2150. Eddard J. Ryan was born in a laboratory off Luna City, an orphan raised by the Black Rose Army, a radical post-Earth Irish revolutionary movement. But his first bombing went wrong and he's been stuck in a borstal on Mercury for decades. System Space has collapsed and most of human civilization with it, but Eddie Ryan and his fellow prisoners continue to suffer the remote-control domination of the borstal and its condescending central authority, the qompURE MERKUR, programmed to treat them as adolescents. Yet things could be worse. With little human supervision, the qompURE can be fooled. There's food and whiskey, and best of all, the girl of Eddie Ryan's dreams, his long-time friend and comrade Koré McAllister, is in the same prison. When his old boss, rich and eccentric chrononaut Count Reginald Skaw shows up in orbit with an entire interstation cruiser at his disposal, there's even the possibility of escape ... back in time.

Mercury Station

2011. Un kulturnaute, un calmar, un Sakespeare, une chienne, un artiste abstrait, un chronomaute, une blanchisseuse, Tom Ripley et ses os traversent New Dystopia. Leurs spéculations accélérées débouchent sur de nouveaux modèles de vie déterritorialisée. Des modèles visionnaires et hallucinés. A travers eux, Mark von Schlegell « expose » quelques-unes des facettes de la catastrophe invisible qui disloque notre monde et à laquelle, notamment, les artistes répondent. Composé dans les coulisses de l'exposition Dystopia au CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, dont il constitue la caisse de résonnance, ce roman illustré, qui pose la question des futurs possibles sous la forme d'une fiction critique, se tient aux avant-poste du roman à venir. Après Venusia (2005) et Mercury Station (2009), tous deux publiés chez Semiotext(e), New Dystopia ets le troisième roman de Mark von Schlegell.

Mark Von Schlegell

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