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.

Founded in 2009, Institute 193 embraces the notion that groundbreaking contemporary art can and does emerge outside of large metropolitan centers. Institute 193 provides artists from Kentucky and the Southeastern United States—selected not by commercial viability, but by the quality and relevance of their work—with exhibition and publication opportunities. It also endeavors to help these artists gain broader media exposure and foster connections in art markets across the globe. Institute 193’s original gallery space is located in Lexington, Kentucky, a mid-sized city with a vibrant creative community. Nevertheless, Lexington lacks a museum or a center for contemporary art. Institute 193 fills this cultural void by hosting musical performances, film screenings, lectures, and other community-driven events in addition to visual art exhibitions.

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