Image: Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center, Pueblo
Mark Gould: Prophets of Our DNA opens January 9, 2027, at the Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center.
Gould’s practice draws on photography, drawing, painting, mixed media, and found objects, shaped by his experience in museum exhibition production and more than five decades of making visual art.
An isolated, austere childhood produced an imaginative respect for the most common objects of his early, day-to-day life: sticks became rifles, bottle-caps boats or soldiers, and cardboard boxes castles. Later, his professional museum and trade-show exhibition experience handling and displaying one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable artifacts and expensive, high-tech components reinforced that imagination with a strong ‘sacredness of the object’ mindset.
In a ‘what-do-I-have-to-lose’ moment, he enrolled in a basic ‘Design 101’ art class. His peregrination through studio art and art history academia combined with substantial designer-craftsman experience in home-building, furniture and cabinet-making, and trade-show and museum exhibition production to produce an extremely idiosyncratic art studio process.
The exhibition page identifies ‘How We Fit In’ as a mixed-media, found-object construction and ‘Society Array I’ as a polyptych of 27 anonymous figure paintings representing society.
