Jean Marc Superville Sovak

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Originally trained as a potter in his father’s native Czech Republic, Jean-Marc Superville- Sovak received his BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and his MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant to Media Artists and a NYFA Strategic
Opportunity Stipend (SOS). His videos are distributed by Videographe, Inc. and have
been screened internationally. In 2009, he was selected as a Smack Mellon Hot Pick and
his guided brick tour of Stuyvesant Town, NY was included the annual Art in Odd Places
festival as well as in Open House New York Weekend. Jean-Marc’s work was most
recently commissioned for the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 8,
held in Murcia, Spain. He lives and collects bricks in Beacon, NY.

Statement

I began collecting cracked and molten fragments of Empire bricks, the waste of one of
the 140 brick plants that once lined the Hudson River, with the idea of using them as a
clumsy and incompetent material to build something of a ruin, in anticipation of the
inevitable. This idea of starting at the end point, of trying to build with material already
ruined, seemed ironic in a very relevant way – with crumbling economic structures and
failed industries, it seems like we live in an age when we stand on the debris of giants as
much as on their shoulders.

The structures I create are not cemented together; I continuously re-organize the same
bricks in a series of modular stacking patterns. They are not monoliths; they are
monuments to impermanence.