EXCERPT: “Subverting right wing conspiracy theories, pop culture memes, and cultural hierarchies of high versus low, Mark Verabioff’s latest exhibition, FORSAKEN STATES, is the perfect foil for our deeply troubled times. In the three large-scale collage paintings and floor decal on view, the artist’s signature mix of appropriated text and imagery concocts an absurdist, equivocal vision of America where “gouty Karens and Kens”, hunky models, white trash antiheroines, and queer patricians hold sway.….As always, these slippages - like the work itself - find a surreptitious appeal in their resolute defiance of logic. As we face a future in which the very notion of truth may become as obsolete as our latest devices, such derailments become harbingers and folly alike. The refusal to make meaning cohere serves as a clarion call as well, confronting us with the specter of what’s to come. In the end, Verabioff’s FORSAKEN STATES, with its absurdist theater of resistance, asks us to become our own insurgents, questioning the world around us, and the world within, even if we can’t make sense of either. “ CATALOGUE AVAILABLE SOON VIA GALLERY: https://mleblancchicago.com/exhibitions#/currentexhibition