Meat Market Gallery

Meat Market Gallery is proud to present the exhibitions DEATH AND GLORY by Mario Wagner and HERIENAFTER by Torkwase Dyson.

In the selection of collages featured in DEATH AND GLORY, Cologne based artist and illustrator Mario Wagner utilizes imagery culled from technology, urbanity and pop culture to explore themes common to city life: displacement, claustrophobia and instability. Figures are blacked out, covered and masked. Environments seem disjointed. Proportional relationships are wildly exaggerated and nothing seems to be where it belongs. Through these strange relationships, Wagner forms a state of insecurity in the viewer he hopes will open a portal to a parallel artistic universe.

With an imaginative and critical eye, New York based interdisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson also explores contemporary culture in the exhibition HEREINAFTER. Through a multi-sensory installation addressing environmental and technological politics in visual culture, the gallery is transformed into a humorous yet cautionary exploration of isolation, hip-hop, and global instability. The animation, sound-scape and wall to floor installation supplant the viewer inside a metric atmosphere of resources vs. availability, consumerism vs. waste and popular culture vs. dissolution. With this installation, Dyson focuses on what she refers to as The Black Eco Imagination, or, “a process of assertive engagement with the history of black ecological conservation through technological creative intelligence.” In this surreal world of fauna, technological invention, characters posses an unexpected mix of optimism and vulgar cynicism. The multi-sensory installation is a representational space that joins popular culture idioms and objects into a consequential setting of planetary wellbeing.