Jasper Marsalis: Einschub

For his first institutional exhibition in the United States, Jasper Marsalis (b. 1995) transforms the lower-level galleries of Aspen Art Museum into a responsive audiovisual environment in which the viewer is both a subject and a participant. Creating an immersive assemblage, Marsalis combines the infrastructure of live events, including microphones, spotlights, a camera, and a screen, with paintings and sculptures. The exhibition unfolds as a site for performance where visitors play a crucial role in generating new images and sounds, and extend their limits of perception.

Marsalis instigates links between acts of artmaking and communal acts of spectacle, questioning the role and power of an audience. In the galleries, Marsalis gives form to both vigilant and despondent acts of observation in his oil paintings. Mirrored, shiny materials, from disco ball tiles to found scraps of foil, reflect a crude impression of the viewer as they encounter the work. A sculpture made from a bowling ball and wood provides a rudimentary diagram of sight: a readymade eyeball with a materialized gaze erupting outward. Together, these artworks sketch a skeletal network of tools for entertainment.

In this show, Marsalis implicates his audiences with sly, slapstick tactics, amplifying their motion through the gallery with embedded microphones and cameras that are programmed to transmit close-ups of faces to LED screens. Building upon performances and sculptures from the 1970s by American Conceptual artists Dan Graham and Vito Acconci, in which cameras were used to blur the boundaries between observer and observed, Marsalis approaches these devices as mechanisms of sensory expansion. Made louder and duplicated, the viewer becomes an estranged version of themselves within Marsalis’s circuits of sight and sound.

The exhibition’s title, Einschub, references a scoring technique by twentieth-century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in which a composition is interrupted by a musical insertion that breaks with the piece’s formal governing structures. Marsalis posits that the exhibition itself, a carving out of space and time for contemplation, is an einschub. In this gallery-cum-arena, objects are people and people are objects, all navigating systems of display and capture. 

Marsalis performs music using under the name Slauson Malone 1, and has performed at the Park Avenue Armory, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Bourse de Commerce, Paris. An intimate series of musical performances by guests invited by Marsalis will unfold in Aspen on the closing weekend of the exhibition. 

Jasper Marsalis (b. 1995, Los Angeles) lives in Los Angeles and London. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; Svetlana, New York. He is featured in the exhibition Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, through May 4, 2025. 

Jasper Marsalis: Einschub is curated by Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, and Stella Bottai, Senior Curator at Large. Special thanks to Anna Martin, Head of Exhibitions. Jasper Marsalis wishes to thank Charlie Buckley-Benjamin, Devlin Claro, Kristina Kite, Oberon Laidler, Charlotte Mandel, Tope Olufemi, Tatiana Tati-Modé, Leopold Thun, Angelina Volk.

Major support is provided by the Aspen Art Museum Exhibition Circle, with special thanks to H. Gael Neeson and Allison Rose.

Additional in-kind support is provided by Meyer Sound.

Aspen Art Museum exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. Support for artists is made possible by the Beckmann-Kotzubei Artist Production Fund.

General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the Aspen Art Museum National Council.

Aspen Art Museum admission is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan.