Searching for exactly what it is he looks like, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak has made countless self-portraits. Over the course of a year in 2006, he shot a video collage of similar-looking men entitled “Brother?” which has shown at Shadow Festival 8, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo Short Film Festival, Brazil, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle, Washington. Several of his other videos are distributed by Videographe Inc. in Montreal and he has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant to Media Artists. His drawings can be viewed online at The Drawing Center Viewing Program and at the Carrie Haddad Gallery. Having graduated in 2007 from the Bard MFA program and suffered really only one major identity crisis, he is now, with his family, integrated in upstate New York, where he is part-time faculty at Columbia-Greene Community College and is designing hard-hats for Rastafarians. His website is supervillesovak.com. 

What would Carl Andre do if he were part black? Or Ed Ruscha if he were raised bilingual?

Like Andre or Ruscha, I am an abstract artist, as abstract as any concept of race or written form of language. Like these artists, I am deeply suspicious of illusionism, I am a materialist; I am more interested in the experiential than the informational, experience as real as racism and as physical as the voice in my throat.

The challenge of colliding the personal-is-political discourse with the legacy of conceptual and minimalist art practices is what motivates me. As a multiracial, multilingual artist, the consequences of some illusions are too real to neglect, and some words matter too much. In my work, what I try to do is make matter out of ideas that matter.