Clay MahnAutoportrait Where do we situate structural awareness in abstraction? At what point do forms become readable as essential – that is to say, irreducible? The work of Clay Mahn exists within the extent of architecture as Koolhaas describes it – a way of making sense about things in the context of their presentation; how modifications of things interact as events and dictate sensibilities about objects and images. In “Autoportrait”, our first distinction becomes one of agency: presented with a portrait – of a thing, a space, a person, a self-hood, a facet of individuality. All of these things can be sought in the work through its oscillation between bilaterally symmetrical and contrapposto forms, but the work begins to unravel as its material and image states coalesce and transpose onto one another. Mahn’s surface treatment is unlike what you would expect of a paint application: the opaque, dusty quality suggests an intrinsic image, as if the paintings are extrusions of a field, the third dimension mapped through an extension of an immaterial plane. This, in conjunction with a certain wobbly, uneasy graphic line quality essentializes the nature of this painting as a person-like actor, a specific deviation from an ideal form. At the same time, Mahn’s paintings are operatively self-defining; his compositions follow the rules of their surface-as-vessel, or by hierarchical strata of seemingly earlier, or more prescient compositional states. It is as if we are looking up the definition for the word definition; Mahn has inserted us in a circular compositional system whose totality eludes both the object and the image. Mahn’s sculpture occupies a similar territory: cast from unknown forms, the iterative pieces, grouped together, form a kind of Fordist geology. The regularity of crystalline structures gives way to inexact permutations whose affect lies in the production of grounded material type. – John Tennison, 2016 (b. 1988) Clay Mahn lives and works in Chicago, IL. He is a current MFA candidate in the department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mahn’s work engages the tropes of abstraction, mark, and gesture through a precarious and playful dialect. His paintings utilize recurrent motifs, frames, and patterns echoed by sculptural forms derived from found objects and materials. Recent exhibitions include Left, Right, Left at TW Fine Art in Brisbane, Australia and a two-person exhibit at PULSE Miami Beach with photographer Ryan James MacFarland. Mahn was born in Missoula, MT and received his BFA from the University of Montana in 2012. | Installation view, Autoportrait | Installation view, Autoportrait | Cupped (A), 2016, cement, 12 x 13 x 12 inches | Untitled, 2016, acrylic on panel, 13.5 x 10.5 inches | Archi, 2016, acrylic, powdered marble on muslin over panel, 23 x 15.5 inches | Autoportrait (D), 2016, acrylic, powdered marble on muslin over panel, 24 x 19.25 inches | Eathers, 2016, cement, plasterboard, 32 x 24 x 8 inches | Installation view, Autoportrait | Bitter Tea, 2016, oil, acrylic on panel, 16 x 12 inches | Thumbs Off, 2016, acrylic, powdered marble on muslin over panel, 11.75 x 8.75 inches | Cupped (B), 2016, cement, 12 x 13 x 12 inches | Installation view, Autoportrait | Installation view, Autoportrait | Untitled (sia), 2016, poplar, acrylic, paper, glue, 20 x 14 x 1 inches | Installation view, Autoportrait | Autoportrait (B), 2016, acrylic, powdered marble on muslin over panel, 20 x 15.75 inches |