Stafford's current body of work forms at the intersections between the physical reality we inhabit and the intangible structures heightening our experience as supported by our collective intuitions and collaborations. Emerging from digital image, drawing, painting, and sculpture, In Medias Res approaches forms between two and three dimensions that wrestle with the nature of reality, time, and space where subject and context, frame and format are competitively interwoven in their stated compositions. A struggle to understand the forms and formation of reality and awareness, between ourselves and our connections to the unknown.
Having grown up with epilepsy mostly in the vast and rugged environments of Alaska, Arizona, and New York over a few decades, he has always been aware of, and interested in the network of collaborating and competing narratives that correlate to our present. In this extended and elastic notion of time and physicality, his work has captured many of our struggles with identity and purpose beginning at the turn of the millennium, and continues into our entangled excitement and intrigue about the nature of existence as we begin reaching into the stars, which he hopes is an effort to continue building the network of the human narrative without leaving Earth behind, strives to grasp the nature of reality.
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Mark Stafford lives and works in New York City and was born in 1978. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and went to undergraduate school in Tucson, Arizona. Extreme environments impressed upon him the incredible vastness of nature and the order to which it directs our destiny. These concrete localities opened his mind to a deeper connection to existence and the feedback loop we engage in as both its inhabitants and co-creators. He earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including SCOPE Miami, Yellowstone Museum of Art, Ground Floor Gallery, SLAG Gallery, Black and White Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, New American Paintings, Vivid in the UK, and Open Art in Beijing, China.