Marc Swanson works in diverse media, including sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, and installation. Given this diversity, the artist employs a surprisingly refined range of materials, relying on a concentrated vocabulary of wood, glass, textile, naturally shed animal antlers, and precious metals. He often juxtaposes “high” and “low” materials in the same work: rhinestones, gold and silver chain, and black mirrored panels meet lumberyard two-by-fours and white cotton t-shirts coated in latex. In these juxtapositions, the former adorns the latter in a way that is transformative for both.
The artist grew up the son of an ex-Marine and avid hunter in small-town New England. He then moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s and became involved in the city’s gay counterculture and club scene. He did not feel totally at home in either place, and he began making his first mature work-the crystal covered deer head sculptures for which he is perhaps best known-as a way to explore, both physically and spiritually, the duality of masculine identities he was experiencing. To this day, this investigation of personal history saturates his work in all media, as does a quiet nostalgia that accompanies such a mining of the artist’s past. As the critic David Velasco writes, “Swanson is an automythologist, one who excels at crafting sparkling, enigmatic totems from the messiness of his own history.” The artist has also been called an alchemist, recasting the aesthetic and cultural connotations of his materials through a visceral, highly personal narrative.
At the same time, using a restricted palette consisting almost exclusively of black, white, and the light brown color known as fawn, and incorporating visual elements of the occult, Swanson is also a formalist, situated in an art historical tradition that includes Barnett Newman, and the Russian avant-garde as much as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Anger, and Bruce Conner. It is this admixture of formal preoccupation and intimate personal record that leads the scholar Bill Arning to call Marc Swanson the “archetypal constructivist” of our time.
The artist grew up the son of an ex-Marine and avid hunter in small-town New England. He then moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s and became involved in the city’s gay counterculture and club scene. He did not feel totally at home in either place, and he began making his first mature work-the crystal covered deer head sculptures for which he is perhaps best known-as a way to explore, both physically and spiritually, the duality of masculine identities he was experiencing. To this day, this investigation of personal history saturates his work in all media, as does a quiet nostalgia that accompanies such a mining of the artist’s past. As the critic David Velasco writes, “Swanson is an automythologist, one who excels at crafting sparkling, enigmatic totems from the messiness of his own history.” The artist has also been called an alchemist, recasting the aesthetic and cultural connotations of his materials through a visceral, highly personal narrative.
At the same time, using a restricted palette consisting almost exclusively of black, white, and the light brown color known as fawn, and incorporating visual elements of the occult, Swanson is also a formalist, situated in an art historical tradition that includes Barnett Newman, and the Russian avant-garde as much as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Anger, and Bruce Conner. It is this admixture of formal preoccupation and intimate personal record that leads the scholar Bill Arning to call Marc Swanson the “archetypal constructivist” of our time.
