Mark Neufeld

• MFA (Victoria)
• BFA (Emily Carr University of Art + Design)

Mark Neufeld works in between a variety of disciplines and media, with painting as the basis for his activities. His work takes the form of installations that interweave paintings with readymade objects and assemblages, and utilize presentation strategies borrowed from the curatorial domain. 

Thematically, Neufeld’s exhibitions weave together a variety of interests pulled from popular culture, history and art history, often focusing on popular mythologies and the self-identities we construct around them. Recent exhibitions have played with Western Canadian historical re-enactments and the cowboy as a masculine identity type, at times conflating real history with western genre cinematic tropes. The paintings produced for these exhibitions are made with the historical artifact in mind, and operate as types or genres within the exhibition framework. 

Currently these interests have lead to a consideration of theatre and the use of hired actors, as a means of both supplementing and complicating themes developed within the work(s). Among many things, the presence of an actor armed with a script can alter the demands placed upon an exhibition, (re)activating its contents, temporarily turning a room into a stage, a sculptural assemblage into an improvised prop. The potential glimpsed here emerges from these dynamics.