Mark Joshua Epstein
Laughing Along with a Lump in my Throat
January 18 - March 15, 2025
Matéria is pleased to present Laughing Along with a Lump in my Throat, Mark Joshua Epstein's first solo exhibition in Detroit, including new three-dimensional paintings and works on paper.
Epstein's work is driven by a desire to formulate an abstract visual language that is embedded with markers of personal history and cultural identity. The simultaneously discordant and harmonious shapes that play across the surfaces of his work encode reference points drawn from aspects of his Jewish and queer identities, inviting questions about the coordinates where they may intersect.
In his current sculptural paintings and works on paper, these entangled shapes are themselves echoes of those that appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish cut paper works. Made with laborious care by both amateur and professional artists, the central texts that they depicted are typically framed by intricate patterned borders, and were displayed in the home as both ornament and talisman. For Epstein, taking inspiration from these works is a reclamation, one that seeks to revive a domestic history that was nearly erased by the Second World War. In responding to their forms, his practice envisions what might have been if once thriving Jewish communities in Europe had stayed intact.
A different vernacular of the home–the curvilinear forms of 1980s laminate furnishings–finds its way into Epstein's work through an even more personal link. This same furniture was sold by his Jewish, Polish-born grandfather in the store he co-owned on Long Island. In Epstein's youth, the stylized dressers and desks that were displayed on the shop floor imprinted on him, in all of their pastel, melamine glory, the wares he sold gave shape to young Epstein's dreams of vibrant futures.
While these visual elements draw directly on the artist's relationship to biological family and cultural tradition, the visualization of queerness in his work purposely eschews a straightforward correspondence to definitive forms. This stance reflects Epstein's commitment to exploring the inherent complexity of visibility politics through abstraction. The histories of queer and Jewish people alike are shaped by an awareness that obscuring markers of identity in certain situations is essential for survival. Code-switching was, and remains, a vital strategy, and so the colored shapes that cloak these reliefs function in some way as camouflage that conceals their formal and conceptual armatures. Yet at the same time, these very systems of dissemblance can also serve as beacons, as invitations to new home places of refuge, solidarity, and possibility.