High Strangeness
Mark Farrell: High Strangeness
Lane Meyer Projects
2528 Walnut Street, Denver, CO 80205
May 5-July 2, 2023
Admission: Free
Review by Madeleine Boyson
An iron maiden in the front yard. A barefoot guitarist in a cemetery. Cthulhu in his oubliette. And it only gets weirder at Lane Meyer Projects. On view through July 2, High Strangeness features eight paintings by Littleton, Colorado-born and -based artist Mark Farrell that are gleefully sinister and ominously playful.
An installation view of Mark Farrell’s exhibition High Strangeness at Lane Meyer Projects. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
Farrell’s works are ideal for the room in which they are featured. The exhibition evokes a corresponding impishness to RiNo’s PoN pOn art bar—through which visitors must walk to reach the project space—while indulging in macabre spectacles that parody cultural façades. But Farrell does more than blur the line between “classic horror and the suburban mundane,” producing multi-layered scenes that delight in the true comedic horror of living in the twenty-first century: life itself. [1]
Mark Farrell, Cthulhu’s Oubliette, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 63 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
Like an ouroboros eating its own tail, High Strangeness has no beginning or end, and visitors can view the artworks in any order. Each painting similarly offers a closed loop system without a singular focal point, narrative, or moral, employing swathes of neon color and minute details to create microcosms of the Suburban Gothic experience. [2]
Mark Farrell, Premature Burial, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
Mark Farrell, Swamp, 2023, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
Farrell’s work also relies on peeking behind bushes and “peering through windows or chain link fences,” as Marsha Mack describes in the exhibition’s press release. [3] Premature Burial (2022) and Swamp (2023), for example, are covered in criss-cross lines that turn viewers into bystanders. Audiences are forced to peer in on chaos that might be ours—hasty burials, lawn fires, hideouts for neighborhood youths, and worse, speed traps—but we must content ourselves with witnessing the most bizarre private moments even as we are unable to offer assistance.
Mark Farrell, On the Corner, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
In On the Corner (2023), viewers (or voyeurs) stalk an upper middle class family of women witches, one of whom reprimands the vehicular culprit of dog-slaughter from their front porch. A cauldron sporting “PRO CHOICE 4 EVA” boils on the stoop and a yard sign announces “abortion is her right ♡” against yellow trees and fiery landscapes. In the foreground, Farrell’s brushwork creates serpentine bushes hiding secrets of their own: a graffitied face mid-scream, a red Ouija board, a king cobra’s candle magic, and, most importantly, the viewers themselves.
Mark Farrell, Beyond the Boundaries of Sin, 2023, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
But not every absurdity is unfavorable and comedy punctuates even Farrell’s goriest scenes. The artist’s “haunted dream house” in Beyond the Boundaries of Sin (2023) unveils all manner of anarchy that might burst forth if only suburbia allowed for a little self-expression. [4] The popular twelve-foot Home Depot skeleton comes alive near murderous children, and spiked heads line a river of blood. Satan’s high priest emerges from the front door even as Wee Willie Winkie (or another night-capped figure?) sits glowing on the roof, and the whole scene exhibits more scythes than any one nuclear family really needs.
Mark Farrell, Plague Effigy, 2021, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
Layering so many symbols, references, and metaphors is Farrell’s specialty, as seen in this author’s favorite—and also the spookiest—artwork in the gallery: Plague Effigy (2023). The painting is indeed “crawling with life” (or at least the undead) as a filmy Ruth Bader Ginsberg (wearing judicial robes that read “Don’t fuck with Ruth”) is joined by the devil in a gas mask, ghoulish cacti, decapitated heads, and a primordial ooze dripping out of steel trash cans. [6]
Mark Farrell, Stanley Hotel, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 x 63 inches. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Lane Meyer Projects.
As a viewer, it is impossible to be certain that one understands each glyph in Farrell’s lexicon. But this is a metaphor for both the artist’s work and the contemporary world he parodies: it’s all a cosmic joke, you know, and someone has opted not to share the punchline. The effect of High Strangeness is similar to that of Hudson Rowan’s viral “spider-robot-humanoid” I Voted sticker from 2022. [5] Both are brambly and chaotic, but also absurd and fantastical, reminding viewers that the present moment is as ridiculous as it is horrifying, and you had better believe we’re going to lean into it.
Madeleine Boyson (she/her) is a Denver-based writer, artist, lecturer, and curator whose work concentrates on American modernism, natural photography, and (dis)ability studies. She holds a BA in Art History and History from the University of Denver and volunteers as Development Director for Femme Salée—an online intersectional platform focusing on complex embodiment in the arts.
[1] Marsha Mack, from Lane Meyer Projects High Strangeness exhibition press release, May 2, 2023.
[2] Suburban Gothic is “a sub-genre of the wider American Gothic tradition that often dramatizes anxieties arising from the mass suburbanization of the United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations, and protagonists” (Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009), 2). Suburban Gothic is also understood in popular aesthetic “core” culture as an style “based around feelings of alienation and the uncanny” in suburbia (“Suburban Gothic,” Aesthetics Wiki, Fandom, https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Suburban_Gothic).
[3] Mack, High Strangeness press release.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jonaki Mehta and Justine Kenin, “A teenager’s ‘I Voted’ sticker design hits a nerve, and now everyone wants one,” NPR Politics, https://www.npr.org/2022/07/30/1114461473/politics-election-i-voted-sticker-teenager-competition.
