California State University, Northridge Art Galleries is honored to present the exhibition Graphic Subversion: Mark Steven Greenfield & Mark Dean Veca, curated by CSUN Professor Emeritus Betty Ann Brown.
A native Angeleno, Mark Steven Greenfield studied with Charles White at Otis Art Institute, and served as the director of Watts Towers Art Center and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. He has exhibited widely received numerous grants and honors, the most recent coming from the Craft Contemporary in October 2019.
Residing in Altadena, California, Mark Dean Veca earned his BFA at Otis Art Institute, and he has won several awards and honors, including the C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Veca is currently working on the design for LA Metro’s Purple Line.
Both Greenfield and Veca use art to subvert media clichés to create “sneak attacks” on contemporary culture. Their work urges us not to accept media images as neutral, but to explore the nature of their history and impact, and what they communicate both overtly and covertly. Greenfield often addresses racial stereotypes, and Veca examines marketing mascots, cartoon characters and aristocratic emblems; their work encourages viewers to think critically about the tropes that dominate our mass media world.
Both artists create paintings and drawings dominated by calligraphic marks that energize and elaborate the pictorial field: Greenfield’s linear marks resemble tiny black bolts of lightning; Veca’s are fluid crosshatches, curved marks traditionally used to give depth and shade. Both artists present sometimes-unsettling subjects in dynamic graphic realms that attract visually even as they challenge conceptually.
A major art exhibition space in the San Fernando Valley, the CSUN Art Galleries are located just a few miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The Galleries have mounted over 500 exhibitions since 1980 with yearly gallery attendance averaging 25,000 visitors.
Gallery hours are from noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and noon to 8 p.m. on Thursday. More information and press images are available upon request; call the Art Galleries at (818) 677-2156 or visit www.csun.edu/artgalleries.
