Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks is an exhibition of 239 sewn works by China Marks at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art.
Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks
April 24–July 11, 2026
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
“I don’t think that anything I make really stands outside the various overlapping and interpenetrating worlds that comprise our present reality,” reads the exhibition vinyl quoting the artist China Marks in the far corner of Lucid Perturbations at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. “Things out there—murders, starvation, genocide, the coarsening and brutalization of whole populations, natural disasters and extinctions—are terrifying. Beauty and menace seem to go well together.” But how do beauty and menace reconcile when crises of all kinds—environmental, political, economic—have the proverbial spear to our throats?
Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks is an exhibition of 239 sewn works by China Marks, an artist who remains under the radar despite an extensive national and international exhibition history. A printmaker, painter, and sculptor for many years, Marks pivoted to creating what she calls “sewn drawings” in 2001. The works on view in Lucid Perturbations—which represent roughly a third of the artist’s prodigious output in the last twenty-odd years of her artistic practice—are beguiling. Front and center in the exhibition is Above and Below (2022), a large piece in somber tones dominated by a shadow figure with one outstretched appendage, a trance-like stare, and a slightly agape mouth. A speech bubble escapes from the figure’s mouth and reads, “now I see.” The oracular statement—paired with the subdued lighting, snaking exhibition design, and abundance of works—gives the show a dreamlike quality fitting for the Land of Enchantment.
The exhibition as dreamscape is limned in the drama unfolding in Marks’s tableaux. Surreal figures stitched together from “fabric fragments” and “patterned scraps” inhabit bizarre, disorienting scenes that might feel nightmarish at first glance, but also offer viewers witty dialogue or quotidian scenes such as lovers’ feuds and family dinner, as well as the occasional volley of racy language. In one scene, one may empathize with the loneliness of the unrequited lover; in the next, one is ringside at a blood sport. These hypnagogic panels and books immerse viewers in a world where familiar stories of Western culture are inverted—stories of divine sacrifice become allegory for racialized violence; the geopolitical quagmire of the Middle East becomes a sardonic condemnation of Western apathy; and tragicomic scenes of intersubjectivity become mirrors of human relationships.
The concise and often comedic distillation of the insanity and banality of being alive creates a bond between artist and viewer. Yes, the world is falling apart, but we can still share a laugh, right? As Oscar Wilde wrote, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
Marks’s humor—in turns dark, melancholic, or deadpan—is the thread that ties the exhibition together and makes it painfully relatable. Through the embrace of, and dedication to, process, Marks reconciled beauty and menace into an imperfect but rich and expansive world, redolent of meaning. Lucid Perturbations enjoins viewers to do the same—to tap into their subconscious drive, trust it, and see what it may produce. Here, expression—whether in Marks’s process or in our comprehension of reality—becomes the first step in transforming dissonance into coherence.
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