EMERGING is a regular column where ARTINFO spotlights an up-and-coming artist.
Within the murals and drawings of Mark Licari, objects, animals, and organic material collide in a glorious chain of growth and decay. Flowers burst in puffs of dirt from dresser drawers and worn men’s suits; a vortex consumes household plants, records, disembodied eyes, and a television set punctured by tentacles; a house rockets into a sky clouded with letters, trailing its plumbing like the roots of a extirpated tree, as an airplane soars out of its chimney.
“The natural world and science have always been interests of mine,” Licari told ARTINFO. “I'm interested in certain general themes such as growth, decay, energy, technology, and ecology. How things connect is a recurring question in the work.”
The Los Angeles-based artist was born in Atlanta in 1975, later moving to Charlotte, North Carolina before earning his BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997. He soon worked his way west to Los Angeles in 1998, graduating with an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2000. He has stayed in the city ever since.
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), his mural “Deciduous Flyer” is currently offering a dynamic entrance to the “Drawing Surrealism” exhibition. Rather than “attempting to connect with [his] subconscious mind or break down the conscious mind” like the historic artists in the show, he gathered a maelstrom of images to generate a surreal narrative. In the mural, a series of contraptions including a vacuum cleaner and wheelbarrow join through twists of pipes and tubing, with a fan whirring out of the mechanical commotion like a sunflower, approached by an eager buzzing bee.
“I like the idea of unused or unneeded parts just falling off and new parts regrowing,” he explained. “I want the piece to function with the viewer as a ‘choose your own adventure story’ of sorts. So I depict a small part and the viewer can then wonder about what happened and where things are going and it is different for everyone.”
He cites one of his many influences as Jean Tinguely’s large motorized sculpture “Cascade,” which resides in the Carillon Building lobby in Charlotte. The kinetic mobile, with its chaotic mix of objects like antlers, the hood of a Ferrari, and arches of lights, had “a whimsy to it that made a lasting impression” for a young Licari. His mural at the Drawing Center in 2005 is an example of his playful explorations in staging conflicts between the manmade and organic, with anteaters twisting their tongues through vents, searching for ants in a strange apparatus that belches out insects and yellow goo.
Although he draws intuitively, he’s constantly gathering drawings in sketchbooks and journals that emerge in his work, often incorporating the architecture of space into site-specific pieces. At the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia this year, he painted two murals on Cockatoo Island, one of a ship moored down by consuming plants, and another of a vine coiling around a tower — a sort of real-world version of his mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in Florida also this year, where he created a water tower being crumpled down by a grasping vine, water spilling down from its 32-foot height.
Currently, Licari is planning for a summer show at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen and working on a new lithograph at Hamilton Press in Venice, California, continuing to capture in detail the clash between organic and manmade, where destruction spawns the unexpected and new.