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“Picturing Marwencol” opens at Esopus Space

August 16, 2010

Esopus Space is pleased to present “Picturing Marwencol,” an exhibition of photographs by Kingston, NY –based artist Mark Hogancamp, that will run from September 16 to October 28, 2010. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 16, from 7 to 9pm.

On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was brutally attacked by five men in his hometown of Kingston, New York. The assault left the ex-navyman, carpenter, and showroom designer in a coma for nine days; he emerged with brain damage that initially made it impossible for him to walk, eat, or speak. Physical and occupational therapy helped him regain basic motor skills, but after less than a year he discovered that without insurance, he could no longer afford it.

Determined “not to let those five guys win,” Hogancamp turned to art as a therapeutic tool. He revisited his childhood hobbies of collecting toy soldiers and building and painting models. Commandeering a pile of scrap wood left behind by a contractor, he constructed “Marwencol,” a fictional Belgian town built to one-sixth scale in his backyard. He populated it with military figurines and Barbie dolls representing World War II personages like Patton and Hitler as well as stand-ins for himself, his friends, and his family. Finally, he dusted off an old camera and used it to capture staged events ranging from pitched battles between occupying German and American forces to catfights in the town bar.

Mark Hogancamp made his public debut in 2005 when “Marwencol on my Mind,” a piece featuring a selection of the artist’s extraordinary photographs and the inspiring story behind them, appeared in Esopus 5. Hogancamp’s work has since been featured in a number of exhibitions, including a oneperson show at White Columns in NYC in 2006 and “Intimacies of Distant War,” a group exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY, in 2008. This October, Marwencol, a feature film about the artist, will be released in the U.S. and Canada. The documentary, by filmmaker Jeff Malmberg, an Esopus subscriber who first learned about Hogancamp through the magazine, has already won numerous awards on the festival circuit, including Grand Jury Prizes for Best Documentary at the South By Southwest and Seattle International Film Festivals and a “Best Film” honor at Comic-Con 2010.

“Picturing Marwencol” features 43 photographs taken by Hogancamp of his imaginary town in the past several years. These images depict everything from intimate, erotically charged moments between lovers to brutal, vividly realized battle scenes. Each of them demonstrates what critic Jerry Saltz called Hogancamp’s “uncanny feel for body language, psychology, and stage direction.” What began for Hogancamp as an effort solely to regain his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack has become much more. Through its conflation of the personal and the historical, the specific and the universal, the real and the imagined, this photographic series makes one of the strongest artistic statements of the past decade.

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