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Mark Shorter

Mapping La Mancha, 2015, still from performance, photo: Daegan Wells
Mapping La Mancha, 2015, still from performance, photo: Daegan Wells

bio:

Mark Shorter is Head of Sculpture at the Victorian College of Arts in the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, the University of Melbourne. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney and the Sydney College of the Arts where he completed a PhD in Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions and performances include Song for von Guérard, Carriageworks, as part of The National (2019), Hello Stranger, Campbelltown Art Centre (2018), The Lonesome Receiver Gertrude Glasshouse (2018), 6m of Plinth, Artspace, Sydney (2016); Mapping La Mancha, Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (2015); 50 Ways to Kill Renny Kodgers, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart (2014); The Groker, Plato’s Cave, EIDEA House, New York (2015); and Acts of Exposure, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2013). From 2010 to 2012 Shorter was the host of The Renny Kodgers Quiz Hour on Sydney radio station FBi 94.5FM.

"" 2019

statement:

Mark Shorter makes performances and installations that question dominant narratives around landscape, gender and the body by stretching and turning the ideologies that sit deep in their form to see what bends or breaks. While he often performs as himself he also makes art through a variety of guises such as the vaudeville cowboy, Renny Kodgers, the quixotic journeyman Tino La Bamba, and the time-travelling landscape painting critic Schleimgurgeln. These performance investigations express a contemporary grotesque and propose an art that is guttural, visceral and not beholden to the cerebral.

Song for Von Guerard, 2019, production still, photo: Zan Wimberley
Song for Von Guerard, 2019, production still, photo: Zan Wimberley