/// Perhaps unconsciously, you have touched the raw materials of Vladislav Markov’s work; the ethernet cables, duct tape, or splayed innards of an air mattress from which Markov has extracted some element. In breaking apart familiar objects, he is able to reveal and rely on their physical properties, those that our experience with such items otherwise obscures. Together as sculptures, one forgets what these things once did. For, the found objects which Markov employs, fall into one another with such ease, that their gathering has an oddly naturalizing function. It is as if the coaxial cable, tape, and broom holder of Untitled (2019) are returned to one another, the finding, not an act of discovery but of seeing in one, evidence of a need for the other.
When necessary, Markov creates the things he cannot find in hardware stores or as common industrial objects and their waste. With the most recents works for this exhibition, he has produced a series of three bladders, cast in rubber, that draw in and expel air with the aid of a motor. Each rubber organ occupies a distinct region of the exhibition space, but they remain connected through a series of tubes and wires that trace the gallery’s pathways. The movement of air produced by the machine is not the silent escape of human breath, but as the motor labors and the rubber expands, one is reminded, that it has never been so hard to breathe. \\\
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