BIOGRAPHY
Mark Stevenson is a visual artist whose work examines how perception stabilizes meaning — and how that stability can be unsettled.
His recent body of work, Call Me Ishmael, operates through recurring canopy imagery that invites recognition while withholding resolution. The paintings activate familiar visual cues, then complicate them, foregrounding the viewer’s impulse to impose coherence. The result is an experience that hovers between image and abstraction, where certainty never fully lands.
Stevenson previously exhibited in New York City in the late 1990s, including a solo exhibition at Vis-à-Vis Gallery and group shows at the Heckscher Museum of Art and White Columns. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly.
He lives and works in New York.
Artist Statement
Call Me Ishmael is a body of paintings that examines how recognition forms and destabilizes. The work begins with familiar visual cues — canopy structures, vertical trunks, spatial depth — and then complicates them. Images hover between coherence and collapse, inviting viewers to stabilize what they see while quietly resisting that resolution.
I am interested in the moment when perception locks onto pattern and the assumptions that follow. The paintings do not depict instability; they interrupt the ease with which meaning settles. Recognition is offered but never completed. Forms gather and disperse, foreground and background exchange roles, and certainty remains provisional.
Across the series, repetition does not clarify. It tightens. Each painting functions as an entry point into the same condition: the impulse to make sense of what refuses to fully resolve.