Iconsequentiality and Gallery Comics: Mark Brandl Staff Elaborates

Bringing the comics medium to the gallery space is not restricted to hanging modest size art on a wall. Mark Staff Brandl's adds dimension to them. His work is BIG. Some of his art takes on the entire space of the gallery, more like installation pieces. Another contribution by Staff Brandl is his theoretical exploration of the concepts of gallery comics and of "iconsequentiality," a term he coined. He describes it thus: "[i]n comics as we know them, viewers frequently perceive both the entire page as an iconic unit, similar to a traditional painting, and simultaneously follow the flow of narrative or images from panel to panel, left to right, up to down. A page is often thus concurrently whole/part and openly linear (even multi-linear with the possibility one has to glance "backwards" and "forwards" if desired, while reading). [...] Such a work is therefore ontologically as well as phenomenologically both iconic and sequential. Aesthetic attention becomes a wonderfully anti-purist conceptual blend of, or perhaps flickering between, a rich variety of forms of reading and viewing, most of which are under the control of the perceiver. The ultimate hyper-text/hyper-image united with the joys of an image's patient always-there, self-reliant presence."