The initial iteration of this cycle of works found its dissent during the 2020 Pandemic as an investigation
of the nature of existence. Tapping into an active mediation process coursing from music through
social advocacy podcasts, and finding significant eddies in physics and literature cascading from cultural productions and transcending its form as a spectrum of layered language into abstract color fields.
Inspired by and in collaboration with the formation of our present reality, these works present information as phrases lifted from the social fabric and reinserted in a positive feedback loop. Creating beauty out of the tension between a two and three-dimensional space and suspending certainty and context- much like an infinite manifold coexisting in varying regularity en tandem with our causal time space model.
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Mark Stafford work is about the nature of reality and its emergence in the fields that resonate between abstraction and representation. His work tethers our competing and causal environments that define our macrocosmic physical existence, consciousness, and our relationships with each other.
He was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1978. He has lived in the extremes of the arctic, the desert and New York City for most of his life, with a few years of study in Texas and Philadelphia where he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Now living and working in New York, he has shown his work at the Bronx Museum, the Institue of Contemporary in Philadelphia, Slag Gallery, Black and White Gallery, Exit Art and Socrates Sculpture Park.
The social, cultural, and environmental extremes have always synchronized his focus toward the nature of existence and our ability to illuminate, permeate and project the visions and truths we inhabit as our consciousness navigates the surface of the model-dependent reality we engage with. Likewise, these color fields were developed during the pandemic in a process of active meditation to advocate for the future.
Drawing and writing are part of the artist's morning practice, The Mantras began during the pandemic in 2020, through a suggestion of the artist's mother, as a way to understand what was going on and as a genesis of new ideas.
Tapping into an active mediation process coursing from music through podcasts, and finding significant eddies in physics and literature, these forms cascading from cultural productions and transcending its form as a spectrum of layered language into abstract color fields. The process is inspired by interactions in physics and the exchange of energy and matter in time, space, and the relationships we hold with each other in the present moment.
The artwork is TITLED (bottom left), SIGNED (Bottom right), and contains an INVENTORY# (Bottom right) of the VERSO
The "Mantras" are a cycle of drawings that lead into and are a part of the "Transfiguration of our Model-dependent Reality" which is in the planning stages for exhibition for Staffford's first solo exhibition in Chelsea, New York
- Subject Matter: Holographic universe, positive projection. Higgs boson field,the information and energy we put into the universe.
- Collections: The Unfolding, an introduction in the present moment.
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.