Another Smile at Ampersand Gallery is an exhibition of paintings by Mark Mulroney alongside a selection of carbon transfer drawings made specifically for Dogs Bleeding Evil, the latest small edition book published through their gallery imprint.
In Mulroney's new paintings we enter a world of blurred and distorted origin stories. Fetish figures and masks appropriated from an unknown culture serve as a backdrop for the flowers, melting wax and burning candles that are a staple of his personal iconography. The relationship between the two is unstated, just as it is unclear over whom his Watchers are keeping watch and whether they are benevolent or not. Though cast in a different style, this sense of ambiguity is also central to the drawings in Dogs Bleeding Evil, a visual account of an unresolved and long-running argument about the true nature of humans—are we basically good or essentially evil? As Mulroney describes it, humans are fun-loving, murderous, altruistic killing machines capable of great empathy and destruction, and the drawings in the book explore the wonders of being alive and hungry.
