Other Projects:
Collaborations, Commissions, Competitoins
Ashburton Art Gallery – Foyer Wall Commission
AAG; April – December, 2021
Cinéma of the Rorschach, 2021 Acrylic on hessian with aluminium support bars in nine segments, 6095 x 4495 x 50mm
For Soltero, the theatre is a container for images and collective memory, connecting the physical and theoretical aspects of his work. Soltero’s images begin with the projection of an original photograph created by light reflected from an object. During projection, a passage of light carries the image until striking a surface, creating the second and third copy of the image. What is seen by the viewer is distanced from the original object by four separations. Soltero’s work reflects these layers, physically and contextually alluding to the ever-growing distance between moment and memory.
Cinema of the Rorschach is built upon a found-image of the interior of Irving Theatre in San Francisco, adding to the level of separation between viewed and viewer. Although the theatre closed down before he could experience it, the image provides a reference to the neighbourhood theatres in which Soltero spent the evenings and weekends of his youth.
Soltero’s intricate and intense process begins with digitally separating data from the original image into layers representing levels of light. These layers are then made into large, hyper-detailed stencils and this Warhol-like process of stencilling highlights each layer through the overlapping and slight bleeding of paint. Stencilling also creates a positive and negative map of each layer, which Soltero repurposes across new pieces. The way the stencil is layered and laid also creates tension between the visible and the hidden.
Soltero embraces this subconscious way of viewing to explore themes of personal history and memory. He not only incorporates his own past but allows each viewer the opportunity to apply their personal experience and memory to the work.
text adapted from Reah Somerville’s article, Artbeat, May 2021
A Stone to Strike, A Rock To Stumble Over–
Art Associates at
Ashburton Art Gallery
AAG; April – June, 2021
Cinéma of the Rorschach – Silver, 2020 Acrylic on canvas with aluminium support bar, 1450 x 1840 x 50mm
The Associates are a group of artists that first came togrther as part of an initiative by CoCA Toi Moroki in Otautahi which eventually took on an impetus of its own. (The Associates are: Sarah Anderson, Janneth Gil, Karen Greenslade, Lee Harper, Mikyung Jang, Viv Kepes, Stephanie McEwin, Mark Soltero, Nicki Thorne, Susanne van Tuinen)
Their exhibition A Stone to Strike and a Rock to Stumble Over at the Ashburton Art Galery shows what can happen when artists have space, time, and mutual support. For a highly diverse group of artists from multiple cultural backgrounds, working in vastly diferent media, there is a surprising cohesion to the whole. Certain themes harmonise and repest -our relationship with nature and the world, human and natural environments. Each artist has their own take on wtheaytare doing, in part, that just acknowledges the organic, holistic process of art making in general.
Mark Soltero is also interested in human space, though in his case filtered through memory and mechanical/digital processes. Taking a found photographic image of a cinema interior from his 1970s youth in San Francisco, Soltero digitally removes all but tonal skeleton of the scene, reflects the image along its central vertical axis, and paints the result in greatly expanded form in silver and black on the canvas with squeegees. The painting, Cinema of the Rorschach -Silver, without context, has the appearance of abstraction, but perhaps is a statement of the unediability and temporal nature of memory. Like a Rorschach test the painting invites us to project our own interpretations and desires upon it.
– Andrew Paul Wood
Shared Lines – Putahitangi
Cathedral Square, Otautahi, Christchurch; Sept – Dec, 2020
Two Skulls, 2020 Acrylic on paper, 500 x 650mm
Pūtahitanga draws on the surrealist tradition of ‘exquisite corpse’ where each artist contributes an element as part of a collaborative whole. Pūtahitanga is a word that can be translated to mean a confluence or convergence.
Beginning on 25 March, as the Alert Level was moved to Level 4, putting Aotearoa into a nationwide lockdown, Shared Lines concocted a plan to enable artistic collaboration.
The project aims to strengthen connections between artists and communities through New Zealand’s regions and cities.
Producer Linda Lee together with Audrey Baldwin and Amber Clausner selected sixty New Zealand artists to help craft a 35-metre long ‘river’ of an artwork, Pūtahitanga.
In Christchurch, Baldwin facilitated the enormous work’s installation in the foyer of the new Spark building in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square which is on display from September - December 2020.