Hypercastle [Get Ur Freak On]
This Friday my good friend Mark P. Hensel will be performing “Cryptostructures of the Urscape” at MASS Gallery from 8 – 11 p.m.
As an artist, he has done it all – from roaming the deserts of New Mexico wearing only slippers to snuggling with leaf blowers to dabbling in everything from cartoons to performance art to sculpture, all of which he still condones.
I’d like to tell a story about Mark that I hope doesn’t ruin any of his mystique. Two years ago we lived in the same small apartment complex and we became fast friends. Everytime you went to Mark’s apartment you would find him doing one of only a few things:
- smoking cigarettes and ashing them into an old Progresso lentil soup can
- brewing sick-tasting coffee, to be consumed by the liter
- wrapping himself in bundles of neon yarn
- working on a homemade loom with more neon yarn
- watching Sun Ra movies
- burning through Sharpies making cartoons and zines
- stroking his magnanimous beard
Actually now that I think about it, you really couldn’t predict what he would be doing when you went into his home. I think he went to work a few times as a substitute teacher but the fantasy world of his video game shop was preferable to anything else at the time.
Mark approaches art like a freight train, there is none of this delicate hand holding and theory. It seems to just comes to him like air does to most people.
His past performances always felt more like incantations to which the audience were unwittingly susceptible, steadily broiling these energies until the atmosphere was so charged that it felt like anything could potentially happen at any second. (Sometimes it did: an ex threw a melted chocolate Frosty at me at one performance.)
This particular show will consist of one massive installation and a series of animations, which Mark called “visions of cryptostructures.” If you are interested in reaching through the veil of consciousness for FREE then please come and see this show.
Tags: Hypercastle, Mark P. Hensel, MASS Gallery, Performance art, Sharpies, Zines
This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
