Marc Sapir

Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

Artist statement

Through the superimposition of natural and built forms, my work explores relationships between abstraction and representation, as well as the authority of inherited historical geographies. Color functions as a sensual and narrative element within these layered constructions. My series of ink and watercolor works on paper uses fragments of botanical root systems as foundational elements in the construction of layered compositions. These organic forms enter into dialogue with architectural and geographic structures derived from fortified city plans found in antiquarian maps. The juxtaposition of roots, maps, and architectural forms evokes interconnected systems of growth, containment, memory, and place. The collaged drawings repurpose sheets and covers from antiquarian volumes, which are “glossed” and layered with redrawn historical city plans, map imagery, text fragments, and traces of painted and printed elements. Through this process of accumulation and alteration, I reimagine images and geographies while engaging with the histories and fragilities of knowledge and the shifting architectures of place. By bringing together writing, books, mapping, fortifications, atlases, nature, and decay, the work inhabits a space marked by the patina of history while remaining attuned to the contemporary. These layered surfaces become sites where natural and constructed forms, past and present, abstraction and representation continually overlap and transform one another.

Artwork