Mark Petrick

Mark Petrick
Lamy, New Mexico, USA

STATEMENT

I make art founded in photographic and digital imaging technology utilizing collage strategies. I usually work in suites of images. For my recent project, an Alphabet (2020), a child’s alphabet primer served as the structure for twenty-six photo/graphic images brought together in a book. Each image includes a unique page from an antique manual from a Japanese Zen monastery photographed with a film negative of a letter from the deaf sign alphabet lit from underneath. These photographs were then brought into the digital space for further manipulation and layering with additional images. The suite of images were brought together in a small book with each spread displaying the letter and definition phrase on the left and the photo/graphic image on the right. In some sense the work is illustrative. But, I have always viewed the combining of text and images as a kind of poetry, an evocation of ideas and feelings that may be broader than simply illustration.

BIO

Mark Paul Petrick earned his undergraduate degree in fine art from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in architecture. He earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he was a Mellon Fellow at the school’s Center for Art and Technology. He taught college art and photography, and exhibited as an artist and photographer at major institutions such as SFMoMA, the Chicago Art Institute, the Walker Art Center, and the Des Moines Art Center. His varied career also included work as a magazine publisher, writer, commercial photographer, work in industrial/public relations, and marketing communications. Mark lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is a student of Zen Buddhism at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center, and continues to pursue his art making.

ARTIST CONTACT

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markpetrick.com

IMAGES