16 Jan 2018

Pepe Mar: Man of the Night

Locust Projects

Reviewed by Elisa Turner

Imagine this: Joseph Cornell's collages surging with steroids and embedded with the head-spinning, Op-Art brio of Julio Le Parc's installations. That's one way to describe the sensation of walking into the intimate, boxy gallery installed with Pepe Mar's "Man of the Night" at Locust Projects.

It's both fun and formally arresting. He has reset conventions of collage and quilting by constructing assemblages with flamboyant tubes of fabric undulating in all directions. This allows audacious, appliqued imagery to push forward with 3-D verve into visual choreography.

The eye ricochets across images of Mexican masks, tropical flora, drag queens, and an actual Moschino t-shirt in fuchsia and black zebra stripes. They commingle with the artists' collection of ephemera from defunct gay clubs in Miami and San Francisco, enhancing Mar's celebration of queer spaces for the mind and body, threaded with fond nods to the past and a joyful generosity to uplift the present.