Landscape might be seen more profitably as something like the “dreamwork” of imperialism, unfolding it’s own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself… -W.J.T. Mitchell

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Scenes From the New Miasma, the debut Los Angeles solo exhibition of New York based painter Marc Handelman. Handelman’s paintings explore the intersection of power, propaganda, national identity, fascism, beauty, and kitsch through subjective fantasies inspired by the rhetorical and visual legacy of nineteenth-century American Landscape painting.

Handelman constructs paintings that seek to dismantle, reify and complicate the seductive relationship between beauty and the moral delusion so often embedded in aestheticizing processes. Drawing from sordid discourses and histories both real and imagined and within a shifting visual framework at once representational, symbolic, and abstract, Handelman’s paintings conflate spaces that both stabilize and disrupt a comfortable recognition and relationship to his subjects.

Light is a reoccurring motif and subject in his work. From the blinding and annihilating atmosphere of 19th-century Luminist canvases and Albert Speer’s (the Nazi architect’s) Cathedral of Light to its contemporary manifestation at Ground Zero and use within military intelligence operations and advertising, light functions as the entry and vanishing point of the viewing subject.

Among the works featured in the exhibition are Only One, a fourteen-foot long canvas, which pushes a FOX news billboard towards modernist abstraction, the visualization of a “Miasma” and Vision the monumentalization of an un-finished project by the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church.

Marc Handelman is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University. His first solo exhibition in NY opened last fall at Lombard-Freid Projects where he is currently represented. His work has been recently been featured in group exhibitions at Guild & Greyshkul NY, Angstrom TX, Kavi Gupta IL, and Perugi Arte Contemporanea Italy and has been reviewed in publications that include The New Yorker, Artforum, teme celeste, and Flash Art.