Mark Johnsen

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Bio

Mark Johnsen is a visual artist living and working on the unceded territories of the xmky"m, Swxw7mesh and sl"lwta" peoples in Vancouver. He is the co-founder of Patio Press, a collaborative printmaking project run alongside artist Sara-Jeanne Bourget. Mark holds a BFA in Photography from California College of the Arts and an MFA from ECU. He has exhibited throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Bosnia, Spain, Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Websites:

• markjohnsen.net

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Research Interests

Mark's print-based practice investigates how slowed-down methods of looking and collecting contrast with the immediacy and overstimulation of our fast-paced era. A lifetime of skateboarding has trained him to be hyper-aware of unexpected hazards, obstacles, and the physical matter beneath his feet. He looks for alternative potentials in the layered histories of the places while acknowledging the impacts and erasures from the colonial shaping of these spaces. Mark’s work combines print media techniques to build new and seemingly impossible images, formed by chance and iteration, and an informal collaboration with the printing press. Shifting between aerial and first-person perspective, he implements photographic and drawn images ranging from micro and macro vantage points attempting to complicate the perception of pictorial space. Mark draws from the traditional and historical context of printmaking and combines its many processes to create monoprints and monotypes, challenging the typical edition associated with printmaking.