Marlon Kroll
cold open
until 19 October 2024
As a matter of fact.
You enter the story after it's already begun. But hasn’t every story started before we’ve looked on? Each as if it's always been, the future perpetually unfolding. Small fires continually phasing from spark to gasp, poles switching, channel surfing.
Each story exactly as it is, sequences consecutive in real-time tripping over each other in playback.
You privilege the present, tomorrow the epitome of an accident.
You enter the room, you are the story.
You and I share a third eye, watching as you slow dance through time, from set to set, in a relay race where you’re the baton being passed from thing to thing, from place to place.
I’m the walls, the whole house.
You are the moment, fate frowning towards misfortune.
You’re the art of cinema exposed in real time.
The scene opens coldly, but your magnanimous presence gives spark. You swivel the gauge. It's the pilot and finale.
You sing in stereo, but joke that I hear in mono.
It’s a description of an image.
The line between drama and comedy.
Life lived frame by frame.
A video village.
I’m an antenna tuned to you.
Time has passed, and you've found yourself.
A thing churned of good intentions.
You are time, exhibiting itself in a museum of accidents.
And I’m a spectacle written for you.
— Marlon Kroll, September 2024
Marlon Kroll (b. 1992 in Hamburg, Germany) is a Montreal-based artist interested in perception, infinity, and the supernatural. The child of a psychic and a musician, his work articulates questions around embodiment, the nature of reality, and the construction of truth. Recent solo and institutional exhibitions include Lullaby, Management, New York; Majestic Infinite Inner Choir, 12.26, Los Angeles, 2024; Fireflies, Eli Kerr, Montreal; Revelation, Fondrie Darling, Montreal, 2023; Receiver, Acapella, Naples, Italy; Nesting, Foundation Phi, Montreal, 2022; A Chronique Fear, Marvin Gardens, Queens, New York, 2021; Rifts, hovels, a sighing tide, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, 2021; La Machine Qui Enseignait Des Airs Aux Oiseaux, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, 2020; Red Sky at Morning, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, New York, 2019; Sunrise It Crystallize, Parisian Laundry/Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, 2019. Kroll was awarded the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2020. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Montreal, CDPQ Collection, Fidelity Investments Collection, and Foundation Giverny Collection.
