Mark Lewis: In Anticipation of Venice

Opening: MAN, Nuoro, 15th May, 2009

In anticipation of the artist's participation in the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, the MAN Museum of Nuoro is the venue for the first extended Italian anthology of Mark Lewis (Hamilton, Canada, 1958).

Lewis has been chosen to represent Canada, his country of origin, at the Biennale and shows Romance, a short film in which he deconstructs traditional techniques of "film-making".

Concurrently, the MAN will exhibit an extensive anthology of Lewis's work as film-maker/photographer (the only venue of its kind in Italy): the show will range from his début works of the 80s, when through the sole use of photography he explored the fixing of images of natural and everyday surroundings in an entirely novel way, to his subsequent world-wide search for images of movement.

Whether he uses fixed or moving images, Lewis is always interested in "what remains behind us while the world moves, or seems to move, in another direction", an "after" that gives him greater freedom to experiment, without the restrictions of time. From this study emerge images that move in a double dimension, temporal and spatial.

The object of Lewis's search is not so much exotic landscapes or strange surroundings as it is places of everydayness. He draws attention to their force, power and extraordinariness - characteristics that are present, if one knows how to see them, in the most apparently ordinary and "mundane" places.

Lewis's research is also in the technical realm, as in the case of Romance, a silent short where the artist uses a classical film projection technique combined with digital technology in a continuous play of back and forth between what was and what is.

The subject of the short presented in Venice is man's movements and habitats, his settlements and urban agglomerations, wherever they are.

The entire MAN museum will be the stage for Lewis's research: the great and intense images of the Canadian landscape and of other places (or non-places) of Earth; the reality of everyday life as seen through the camera, or other media the artist confronts, in an investigation of raw and realistic poetry.

Mark Lewis, In Anticipation of Venice, MAN, Nuoro, via Satta 27, 15th May - 28th June, 2009.

Exhibition curated by Cristiana Collu and Saretto Cincinelli

Mark Lewis
In Anticipation of Venice
Kuratoren: Cristiana Collu, Saretto Cincinelli