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Mark England:
Redeeming the Visual World
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ENGLAND: For a long time I limited my drawing to just drawing. I didn’t want to say anything; I didn’t want to be distracted by trying to say something profound about the world or whatever you want to call that. Over the last four or five years, though, I’ve begun to focus in on a number of themes and issuses and ideas that are being developed and explored in the drawings. They are still subservient to the fact that the work I do is a drawing first. It’s very important to me that these be visual images first of all -- and then that there be many layers behind that of stories or suggestions or narratives or illustrations of history and time.
FIRST VISIONS
To better understand England’s work,
we are soon walking around the house, examining specific pieces.
England tells us that “Many of my pieces are about an event. An historical
event or a religious event; yet, if you were to look at them you would
hardly recognize it as such.” He has purposely put images together
that make it difficult at first glance to recognize the event for what
it is. In this respect, collage is the perfect medium for one of
his main concerns, the investigation of our perceptions.
To illustrate this point England
indicates a large scale graphite and solvent-transfer piece, entitled “First
Vision” – a referance to the event central to Mormon history when Joseph
Smith was first visited by God and Jesus Christ. The First Vision
and Joseph Smith are common themes in England’s work, as they are in much
Mormon art. England’s version, however, differs greatly from traditional
Mormon “takes” on the event.
In regards to Mormon depictions of
the First Vision, England says, “We seem to be very obsessesed with getting
it right. Getting a literal, photographic, true version of what
happened . . . the idea being that if we paint it just right that somehow
that will increase faith.” According to England, that’s the last
thing it will do. “If anything it will diminish faith and detract
us from true faith.”
England is intrigued by the obsession
with the visual image and its possibly deceptive qualities. In his
version of the First Vision he wants to explore our perceptions of the
event.
“What’s important about the
First Vision is that it is a symbolic event; that something happened and
somebody learned something and not knowing how tall they were or what they
wore. That’s just so superficial to the essence of the First Vision
. . . When I approach the First Vision I’m trying to focus on the symbolism
of the event and not the literalism.”
In his work, England has created
a visual evocation of the 19th-century context from which Joseph Smith
emerged, especially the contradictory elements of Romantacism and the Industrial
Revolution. In the work, machine imagery is set in a pastoral landscape.
A figure rising out of a well – a reference to Joseph Smith’s experience
as a well digger – is “reaching up to something that is the opposite of
this industrial machinery” – solvent transfer collage images representing
Joseph’s visitors. But as England points out “the collage figures
. . . are not like any Heavenly Father of Jesus figures we know.”
God appears to be a transfer of a profile shot of beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Jesus is an old businessman. Do not read too much into the indentities,
however. England is quick to point out that it does not matter.
| To the left of these two figures
is an image which makes it unlikely that this piece will be hanging in
an LDS meetinghouse anytime soon. A nude female figure, arms outstretched,
represents Hevenly Mother, who England figures or hopes was there even
if veiled to Joseph Smith – “Heavenly Mother is obviously our Earth Mother,
and earth mothers and earth goddesses are always very fertile beings, so
what better representation than a very powerful nude figure.” The
nude figure, however, can be very jarring for audiences. Which is
precisely what England wants.
“It’s trying to get us to reconsider how we perceive or take our perceptions for granted.” England sees his artistic process is “an attempt to understand truth.” In the end, for England “whatever thruth you believe is your own creation . . . I’m trying to aknowledge that I firmly believe in some truth but that ultimately they are always my subjective interpretations. |
detail from The First Vision 1999 |
GETTING IT
We eventually descend into what can
best be desribed as “the hall of kitsch.” A basement room, with a
pool table in the center and a raised model train track hugging the walls,
the room is filled with all kinds of odds and ends. Busts of Brigham
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Young and bronze replicas of the
Statue of Liberty are stacked underneath a window. These are the
working materials for the three-dimensional collages that have been a part
of England’s oeuvre. It is obviously from this stack of collected
material that England found a Shriner figurine to act as his Christ at
the Second Coming, surrounded by hoolah girls, in one of his shadow boxes.
He pulls out a series of large, unmounted works on paper and places them on the pool table for viewing. Combinations of drawings and solvent transfers, these works have also begun to introduce more and more color. He points to one work which he calls a portrait of Godron B. Hinkley, the current LDS prophet. The work is an odd mixture for a portrait of a man. Transfers of a young Hinkley can be seen, but there are also transfers of Sunday comics, and most jarring, a series of “cheescake” girls |
England is unabashadley dealing with
being a Mormon, but doing so in such a way that few in the conservative
culture of Mormonism would warm up to his work. When I ask does
he get away with it, or if he think it’s risky, he says – with a smile
-- “If I were a writer it would be diffeerent. People pay attention
to words. But people don’t care about artists.”
This leads us to questions about
England's hopes for the reception of his work.
AOU: What are you hoping
for your audience in regards to your work?
ENGLAND: The first thing I
want is for them to be visually interested enough in [the work] for them
to want to look at it so that they want to stop, spend time with it.
And I want it to be read on many levels and I realize that many people
can’t read it on the more personal levels and I don’t expect them to.
But I expect them at least to be able to be visually stimiluated, to be
intrigued by the lines and the shapes and bring their own associations
to that . . . I want them to get it. But I want them to get it, I
guess, on their own, and I will certainly help them and provide them with
clues . . . I usually just provide prompts . . . People are pretty
bright and figure out an awful lot.
TRACES ACROSS THE LAND
Though England may explore a variety
of issues such as history and perception, one unifying theme in his work
is that all the pieces take place in a landscape. “All my drawings
are about landscape, or take place within a type of landscape. Within
the landscape I’m exploring perceptions . . . how we perceive ourselves,
our history, the earth, events, the future, present, past.”
Some of England’s works which have
appeared in recent exhibitions are graphite drawings of landscapes, seen
from helicopter-eye view, looking down on whole continents. These
are landscapes about landscapes, “histories of our relationship to
the Earth and to the land and the traces we leave on it.”
The United States and North America
appear as subjects in a number of pieces, seen from all points of the compass.
England uses an arial view to present a broad expanse that he fills with
trees, rivers, mountains, telephone poles and a number of surrealistic
elements.
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“The piont of view that I had used
for my drawing of North and South America was from the North Pole, about
a thousand miles up in the air, looking down on North and South America.”
Some elements of the landscape are easily recognizable: the Mississpi River, the San Fransisco bay area, and the Great Salt Lake, complete with spiral jetty. “What this is,” England explains, “is a figurative as well as illustrative and literal drawing of the Unted States of America . . .It’s not concerned with accuracy. But the reason I’m not concerned with accuracy is because I’ve found that no matter how much you study history a lot of it has to do with perceptions. There is no absolute history. We might be able to get some facts relatively close but even those facts are subject to an awful lot of opinions . . . I don’t really believe that you can’t draw any conclusions, that you throw up your hands and say "what’s the point?", but I want to draw attention to the fact that a lot of our history and perceptions are highly subject to what we want to see.” The more of these pieces you see,
the better oriented you become. The Great Salt Lake and the Great
Lakes may indicate the points of the compass. Soon, you see frosty
Canada, or Central America snaking away into the distance.
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REDEEMING THE VISUAL WORLD
The landscapes can also be the vehicle
to explore very personal relationships. When Eugene England, Mark’s
father and a prominent Mormon thinker, requested a drawing of his hometown,
he expected a modest depiction of the pastoral farmland of Downey, Idaho.
What England produced was an expansive view of North and South America
seen from his father’s hometown. The piece takes “a landscape that
we are all too familiar with and [turns] it on its head, literally.”
The drawing really became a portrait of the man himself.
A companion piece, a portrait of his mother entitled “Davenport, Iowa,”
shows the United States looking west from the Atlantic Ocean. The
drawings are meant mostly as a visual statement rather than a literal reading,
“creating a state of mind within a landscape.”
Personal relationships have had an
immense impact on England’s work in the past year. The death of his
father last year and a divorce from his wife brought England to a low point
that resulted in a ten-month period in which not a single work was produced.
“During the past ten months I completely
eliminated art from my life,” England tells us, reflecting on this period
of time which is obviously present in his mind. “And it was only then that
I realized how much making art influenced the way I see things.”
England has thankfully returned to
art. He has created a new graphite/transfer collage entitled “Celebration.”
A long sheet of paper is filled with a free-form layering of images England
found worth celebrating in his life. Reflecting on this “breakthrough”
piece which promises a rebirth of his artistic output, England comments
that in the end “all of my artwork is meant to be a celebration.”
England’s personal celebration is
extending itself outwards toward his community as well. He speaks
of searching for new ways to create communities in his life, and one way
is by undertaking a project with Alpine City. With the city’s help,
he hopes to build the largest earth sculpture ever, with community as its
theme.
Though his recent trials seem to have taught England a lot about himself, his art, and his community, he is quick to point out that he does not see his artwork as an open diary for these things. “I've always hesitated to let my art be a dumping ground for my pain and anguish.” England’s work is indeed more intellectual than it is expressionistic, but his inner life seems to seep into his work in less overt ways. Thoughts of redemption and renewal are obviously present in England’s mind. He speaks about the very
| nature of collage as being redemptive.
By taking ugly or discarded images and placing them in a new context, England
feels he is able to redeem the images and give them new meaning.
His recontexualizing of images both destruct notions and reconstruct new ones. He realizes now that his art in a way is an attempt to “redeem a world I would quickly grow very cynical about.” Collage, solvent-transfers, and the pencil have allowed England to develop a mature style perfectly suited both to his aesthetic and his conceptual concerns. With his graphite drawings and transfer collages, he is essentially throwing a bowling ball towards the pins of our preconceptions, knocking them down, and reassembling them. England may be digging up some of those bowling balls embedded in his lawn and rolling them our way in the near future. Spring is coming and Mark England is ready to get back to work. Being an artist is no easy task, and doing the serious, committed work England does oftentimes goes unappreciated. But I suspect England would make art even if no one would ever see it. “It’s terrifying to take a huge white piece of paper and fill it. It’s like the fifteenth-century sailors who set off west into the great unkown . . . The payoff, though, is really quite exciting.” |
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Photos by Steve Coray; all artwork
is copyright Mark England and may not be reproduced without written permission.
Mark England can be contacted at 801.756.6825 or markengland41@hotmail.com