Artist-in-residence
May 8 – 22, 2015
Mike Marks
Printmaker, Michael Marks has decided to venture from Maine into the northern Midwest in the name of art and “the lake”. Having lived in Cleveland, OH, and with ties to Wisconsin, Marks has spent time around the Great Lakes, which have intrigued him for years, and still do. Having an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware, and having been affiliated with multiple presses across the country, Marks is ready to push pause on his professional life and immerse himself in new surroundings.
“The residency…[will] allow me the time and space to step away from what I comfortably know about myself in the studio, and to find new inspiration to funnel into my artwork from the surrounding landscape and the community around Petoskey.”
With a desire to explore the idea of “the lake”—it’s boundaries and pervasiveness, the effect it has on the land and those living near it, Marks plans to conceptualize “the lake” in his work during his time in the north. He plans to share his residency experience with Good Hart, and the surrounding local communities. Marks also intends to bring back his findings to the creative community in Maine.
Using drawing, collage, and printmaking, my artwork is an attempt to disassemble and reassemble my experiences within landscape, emphasizing the space between narrated memories and observable representations of nature. I strive to search within the margins of the landscape, its contours and layers, interrogating space in both its physical fact and my recollection thereof. This transposition from physical travel to a work on paper acts as a documentation of my interactions with the landscape (hiking, backpacking, fly fishing) and interprets the water, mountains, and weather taken from my observations.The mark making, layering, and color in my artwork creates anchor points of events, passages of time that coalesce into a single image that resonates with both my involvement and my estrangement from the environment. Ultimately, I wish to create an image that exists somewhere between the individual and the landscape.
