For this installment of Art Show, FADER heads out to Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea to talk to photographer Ari Marcopoulos about his current show Wherever you go.
Ari Marcopoulos’ new show at Marlborough is awash in rich blacks and stark whites, photographs that are once abstractions and exercises in intimate portraiture, ranging from large scale prints of NBA player Tyson Chandler (Marcopoulos struck up a friendship with the basketball player after Chandler saw a fan zine the artist had made with his assistant) to smaller rice paper prints of the artist's son or a wall of grafitti. Marcopoulos explained that after years of shooting, he's become increasingly interested in printing processes and ways of imbuing his photographs with literal layers of spontaneity and surprise, right down to the way the ink builds on a print. A video piece called City Riders documents a series of subway rides the artist shot from his cell phone, and offers a bright, chaotic foil to the dark stillness of his photographs, a juxtaposition that perfectly encapsulates Marcopoulos' brand of uncomposed composure. Wherever you go also intersects with a new zine project with Dashwood Books called Anyway, which has the artist producing one zine a week this calendar year and which will be published in an edition of fifty copies each, twenty of which will be withheld until the end of the year for a complete boxed set of 52 zines. Head over to Marlborough before the show closes on June 16th, and stop by Dashwood anytime this year to scoop up Marcopoulos' weekly editions.