Mark Jenkins

Mark Jenkins is an American artist whose work includes sculpture, social experimentation, installation and performance-based mediums. Considering the "street as a stage" his sculptures interact with the surrounding environment including passersbys who unknowingly become actors within his provocative urban installations.

 

Jenkins incorporates real-life contemporary settings with social interaction, creating hyper-realistic sculptures, dressed in urban attire. The lifeless objects and inert materials are imbued with a human familiarity when set within real, lived environments. Jenkins creates his own space, imbuing a narrative where the artificial and the real merge together to become points of interaction where viewers are encouraged to reconnect with their surroundings. For Jenkins it is not only the emanation of the human figure that is integral to his oeuvre, but also the reaction of people who wander past or have stepped into his constructed spaces. Whether they are shocked, amazed, confused, or scared, Jenkins's purposeful placement of these figures acts as a disruptor, seemingly altering the banal routines embedded in our contemporary lives.

 

Mark Jenkins was born in 1970 in Fairfax, United States, he currently lives and works in Washington DC. His works have been presented both in the United States and internationally in places such as Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Russia, South Korea, Serbia, and Japan. His works have also been exhibited in institutions such as the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia, the Centre Pompidou, France, and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon.