ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork reflects processes of change and loss within landscape. Using printmaking and drawing, I create images that contemplate how history becomes ascribed into environment and how nature is represented. Drawing inspiration from the natural and constructed environments I’ve experienced, the resulting works often depict fragments of landscapes overlapping one another. My approach uses the physical nature of printmaking as a vehicle for the language and mechanisms that reshape environments around us, emphasized in the surface of my prints by the use of collograph plates, stencils, embossment, chine-collé, relief and intaglio techniques. These approaches allow me to use the printed multiple to produce variability, not replication. Most recently, I’ve begun working with matrices that break down or disappear entirely during the printing process as a way of reflecting irreversible change and loss, using reductive woodcut and paper- lithography techniques.
It’s my intent to draw parallels to the way nature/wilderness is being constantly re-constructed by forces ranging from the geological to man-made, and how these shifting boundaries makes us re-define what exactly wilderness is. The land around us is as curated a surface as any, and I hope that in making my work I can draw out the beauty I find, even in the marks that mar the places around us. The images in my work vary from the representational to the suggestive, but are always rooted in movement and place. In shifting the representation of landscape from one material to another, the act of printmaking becomes a tool for me to navigate the way in which wilderness meanings and values are socially constructed and contested.
My artwork reflects processes of change and loss within landscape. Using printmaking and drawing, I create images that contemplate how history becomes ascribed into environment and how nature is represented. Drawing inspiration from the natural and constructed environments I’ve experienced, the resulting works often depict fragments of landscapes overlapping one another. My approach uses the physical nature of printmaking as a vehicle for the language and mechanisms that reshape environments around us, emphasized in the surface of my prints by the use of collograph plates, stencils, embossment, chine-collé, relief and intaglio techniques. These approaches allow me to use the printed multiple to produce variability, not replication. Most recently, I’ve begun working with matrices that break down or disappear entirely during the printing process as a way of reflecting irreversible change and loss, using reductive woodcut and paper- lithography techniques.
It’s my intent to draw parallels to the way nature/wilderness is being constantly re-constructed by forces ranging from the geological to man-made, and how these shifting boundaries makes us re-define what exactly wilderness is. The land around us is as curated a surface as any, and I hope that in making my work I can draw out the beauty I find, even in the marks that mar the places around us. The images in my work vary from the representational to the suggestive, but are always rooted in movement and place. In shifting the representation of landscape from one material to another, the act of printmaking becomes a tool for me to navigate the way in which wilderness meanings and values are socially constructed and contested.
BIO
Mike Marks (b. 1984 | Morgantown, WV) holds a BFA in Drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware. His prints and drawings have shown both nationally and internationally. He currently lives and works out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was a 2017/2018 Jerome Foundation Emerging Printmaker in Residence at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and was a 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant awardee. Mike is currently a 2020 McKnight Foundation Fellow in Printmaking at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking.
Prior to relocating to Minnesota, he was Director of Intaglio for Maine-based printmaking collective Pickwick Independent Press from 2013-2016. Mike has taught printmaking at Haystack Mountain School of Craft (ME), Long Island University (NY), and the University of Delaware (DE). He's also conducted workshops at art-centers in New Mexico, Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, and Maine. Mike has been an artist-in-residence at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art (Eastport, ME), Stone Trigger Press (Abiquiu, NM), Crooked Tree Art Center (Petoskey, MI), and Acadia National Park (Mt. Desert Island, ME).
When he's not printing he's usually out backpacking or exploring rivers! Fly rod in hand!!!!
Contact/Inquiries at: mikemarks.art@gmail.com
