Invited artist: MARK ROSPENDA
Relic Record
2022
Paper pulp (recycled failed drawings and other papers)
12 x 1.25 x 12 inches
Relic Record is inspired by an artifact I found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's online database: an encrusted block of iron Assyrian scale mail armor (ca. late 8th–late 7th century B.C.). I'm interested in how the long centuries have transformed the scales, locking them together and turning them into something else—no longer able to perform their original function. Yet even in its transformed state, ideas of protection and time remain, embodied within this curious, wonderful object.
My artwork is made from paper, a material I typically work in. I use paper because of its ease of transformation—mirroring the malleability of our thoughts. As I create drawings, I shred the failures with other papers, turn them into pulp, and create sculptures out of them. The actual plates of "scale mail" in this piece are made from off-cuts of paper pulp book forms I have been creating as I replicate my personal library. In this way, the armor plates represent knowledge and truth. Like the Assyrian armor that was its inspiration, it cannot protect anyone physically. But perhaps the idea of truth is enough—a talismanic protection from all too common untruths and misinformation.
Mark Rospenda’s meticulous nature always presents itself through his work. Using paper as a means of exploring the delicate, mutable nature of our thinking processes, he physically cuts into, shreds, and converts his drawings into pulp. Parts and elements are exchanged between works with some evolving over a number of years. The images that result are moments within a stream of thinking and forgetting—records of memories lost, found and transforming.
His work has been exhibited at the Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, SC; DEMO Project, Springfield, IL; Herron Galleries, Indianapolis, IN; and other locations nationally; and has a solo exhibition scheduled at DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, in 2023. As the winner of the Director’s Choice Award in the 2016 Art From the Heartland exhibition, he was granted a solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN, in 2019.
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From 2011–2022 he was Curator at the South Bend Museum of Art, where he organized and oversaw more than 100 exhibitions during his time at the museum. Rospenda lives and works in South Bend, IN.
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