Born: 1968 Pennsville, New Jersey

Resides: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Though you wouldnt guess it upon first happening upon his work, Rollin Marquette is one of those hardy souls who enjoy playing with fire. Or, to be more precise, with explosives, chemicals, munitions, and miscellaneous other materials apt to do harm. Yet while the artist utilizes such wares baldly-never masking them but in fact magnifying their inherent formal qualities-it is nonetheless surprising and even disquieting when their actual identities are discerned. Indeed, at a glance, Marquettes works appear to be pristine, elegant sculptural compositions with an acute art historical bent-the visual markers of minimalism, land and environmental art, and contemporary installation appearing again and again in his oeuvre, which includes some works meant to inhabit and others to evade the white cube. But for all the morphological similarities, Marquettes project deviates rather radically from strict art genealogies, infusing now-canonical art signifiers with a dose of contemporary toxicity. Literally.

In Shed, for instance, the artist offers a familiar enough motif: a small, basic hut with human-size proportions, measuring some 6x6x6 feet in its three dimensions. Connotations abound for this simple, iconic structure, which can be read equally as comforting (a childs fort), insidious (the Unabombers shack), or generic (the universal symbol for dwelling). Marquette consistently calls attention to the shifting nature of such omnipresent visual signs, and then torques that ambivalence one notch further by infusing them with a kind of sinister beauty. Shed mutely beckons, appearing to be lit from within by some radiating alien force. A jewel-like green is literally emitted from every inch of its surface, as though the walls of the diminutive building were dappled with glowing facets. The precise hue of the green can itself only be described as radioactive, and this seeming hyperbole is actually not without some basis. The shed is, as close inspection reveals, entirely constructed (in a layered, log-cabin fashion) with transparent acrylic tubes, these filled with antifreeze and plugged with rubber stoppers. There is no entrance to the shed, its four walls each indistinguishable from the next. Yet one can hardly imagine taking up habitation there even if there were a way in. The structure, though standing solidly enough, looks as though the slightest bump could disrupt its stacked tubes and unleash the liquid tenuously contained within.

If antifreeze seems a benign enough substance, consider its chemical make-up: primarily ethylene glycol, known for its ability to melt ice at extremely low temperatures (and, interestingly, used in World War I in the manufacture of explosives). It is also, if ingested in substantial quantity, known to shut down the functions of the kidneys, heart, and nervous system. When produced, ethylene glycol is actually clear; the neon green color for which it is known is added, serving as a kind of color-coded warning signifying something akin to nothing this color should go into your body. And yet, another of Marquettes current chemical favorites-propylene glycol-is meant precisely to be ingested. While it, like ethylene glycol, is sometimes used in antifreeze and de-icing solutions, its most typical usage is as filler: Considered safe for consumption by the FDA, it absorbs excess water and maintains moisture in products including cosmetics (like deodorant), medicines, and myriad snack foods (particularly those plumped with artificial flavors and colors).
Where Marquette capitalizes, in Shed, on the unearthly hue of antifreeze, he employs the ostensibly less insidious propylene glycol-mixed with water and sodium stearate (an ingredient, derived from fat, that makes up most soaps)-to more tactile ends. When I first saw the artists Drawing Board, I thought of Joseph Beuyss lard and Matthew Barneys Vaseline, So visceral was the material I was confronted with. A thick slab of opalescent white that conjures associations with beeswax, butter, and mucus, Drawing Board is, as the title suggests, modeled on the dimensions and design of what looks to be a freestanding chalkboard, swiveled just slightly past vertical. Yet, rather than offering up a recognizable surface on which to leave marks with chalk or Sharpie, Marquettes shimmers, semi-transparent and moist. This strangely seductive, slightly squeamish-making surface was created by the artist to approximate ballistic gel, that material utilized by the military in order to test out the efficacy of bullets on human flesh. After experimenting with different ratios, his preferred consistency nearly matches that of the human body, with a 65-percent water content.

The works titled, Drawing Board, draws on a popular cliche: We return to the drawing board every time we encounter a failure or a change in plan. Its interesting to consider Marquettes version, which is at once vehemently literal and uncannily metaphorical. I find myself pondering just what the failure was and what the new direction pursued will be. Just what can be inscribed on/in a drawing board made of chemical flesh, or is the medium, as Marshall McLuhan had it, already the message? Marquettes sculptures perform an odd feat: By playing up the formal beauty of materials we normally never consider aesthetically, they counter intuitively direct us to consider those materials functions in the world. Never didactic, the artist poses poetic visual questions and succinct ruminations on the proximity of the diabolical and the divine. The deeply quite nature of the work is underpinned by a kind of whispered subtext, one that we strain to hear but never quite catch.

Johanna Burton
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