Opening reception: September 20, 6 - 9 pm

Jenny Jaskey Gallery, formerly Tower Gallery, is pleased to
announce the opening of Elevation, a solo exhibition by Mark Shetabi.

In his painting and sculpture, Shetabi uses architectural forms, both
real and imagined, as a departure point to examine ideas having to do
with public and private space. The work begins from an investigation
of the forms that constitute the visual "white noise" in contemporary
life. Within this vocabulary of the boring and the ordinary,
background forms and sensations are transformed into foreground
issues. The focus is less on the high art tradition of architecture as
practiced by Bunshaft, Corbusier, Mies, Kahn, and other Utopian
Modernists, and more on the ambiguous trickle down of this legacy.
The Guggenheim spiral becomes a parking garage. Corbusier's Villa
Savoye becomes a drive-thru. The piazza becomes a zone of constant
surveillance.

In Elevation, Shetabi explores the grey area that exists between the
larger world and the models used to represent it. At what point does
the model become a thing unto itself, and not simply a representation?
Is it possible to completely know a reality, or must we always look
through a frame of reference of some kind? With the distance that a
model affords, one can survey the complexity of a larger system. At
the same time, this distance isolates the viewer from the experience.

Two new sculptures, one diminutive and one immense, will be shown.
Both are models of a parking garage tower. One model sits inside a
Plexiglas display case. The other "model" is over 30 feet long and
occupies the majority of the gallery's large exhibition space.

Also exhibited alongside the sculpture are several paintings based on
the same parking garage form. Whether the sculpture is the model for
the paintings or vice versa is unclear. The exhibition contains
multiple layers of representation, and a confusion of the model and
reality is a desired end result.

Born in New York, as a child Mark Shetabi lived for five years in
Tehran, Iran. His family returned to the United States in 1979, on
the eve of the Iranian Revolution. The experience of being between
cultures has been an enduring subtext of his artistic practice. He
received an MFA in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts. Shetabi has had numerous national exhibitions including solo
shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, Ratio 3 in San Francisco,
and Locks Gallery and Project Room in Philadelphia. He is a 2002
recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Shetabi currently lives
and works in Philadelphia, where he is an Assistant Professor of
Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art.