MC Sparks
Muscle Memory
September 20 – November 02, 2024
Institute 193 is pleased to present Muscle Memory, the first solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based painter MC Sparks. This body of work invites viewers to look underneath the primordial ooze of gender. Sparks made these paintings over the past year, during their own gender transition, inadvertently merging the expansion of their personal identity with their identity as a painter. The resulting works are a series of fantastical and delightfully grotesque scenes that explore the identitarian imaginary. Hints of recognizable matter surface—peaches, graves, trees, and musical notes—weave and bend sonorously over otherworldly landscapes in one fluid motion. This process of corporeal metamorphosis is essential to transness and Sparks’ identity as a painter. The courage to step outside of what is thought to be fixed propels an inner world into being, one previously confined to dreams.
As a trans-masculine person from the South, Sparks contends with a “traditional” sense of manhood by rendering the figures in their paintings as sloping, languid creatures—mermaids finding their way through land. The sea offers so much knowledge about form, its malleability, and even gender, and it is apt for Sparks’ protagonists to exist displaced from their natural habitat. Sparks’ sense of play and camp builds a sense of flexibility and queer visual history. In Falling into Everything, a mermaid emerges from a densely packed camouflage forest, lithe and limp, both embracing the signifiers of manhood and turning them on their head. In Self Creation, an almost effete figure appears in a peach tree, painting themself into being. There is beauty to be found in the unfinished moments, where canvas is exposed and elements of the painting remain fragmentary. These incomplete elements recall the fecundity of baroque painting while underscoring much of the work’s throughline: transness is about a perpetual state becoming, finality falling by the wayside.
Biblical themes echo throughout the work in the form of apples that double as music notes. In Note Picker, Melody Maker, a figure plucks the apples from a windblown music staff, signaling that the self is as fertile as the Garden of Eden, and that making the choice to be “known” as Eve did, can bring about rebirth and transformation.
If that is humanity’s original sin, we should delight in it.
In Resting Place, we see a large heart-shaped tombstone camouflaged into its branching environment. Placed at its feet are not one, but three half-eaten apples, a true indulgence. Left to find their own ways back into the soil, they feed new growth and new songs to be sung. Tombstones, large and weighted, typically signal the end of life, memorializing one’s physical time on earth. Sparks poses the question: must we kill an old self off in order to bloom into another? Likewise in Memory Visitor, where we observe a figure visiting two graves, “R.I.P.” etched into one, literal and punctual, and the other adorned with a dove’s kiss—a soft, sweet reminder that the end is to be cherished like a lover’s embrace.
Sparks visualizes what is often difficult about describing one’s shifting identity. It feels implicit, beyond language, like music, or soupy and transformative like a karmic cycle. But mostly, it is an endless process of layering, building, revealing, altering, masking, sketching, observing, and finessing—just like painting.