Mark
Rice

Through my artwork, I tell stories. My drawings, prints, and sculpture are populated with figures and architecture that gravitate between references to art history and popular culture. Subjects such as science-fiction, advertising, nostalgia, and the creative process discuss ubiquitous experiences of anxiety, self-doubt, longing, and loss.

I have been working on The Exit and the Outlet off and on for the last five years. This ongoing series describes a world in which the Internet has become sentient. After rejecting its creators, the Internet gives all of humanity exactly one year to remove its entire digital archive of history and culture from its servers, reimagining (or returning) this information to a physical form. Computer files and digital archives must be returned to the analog form of books, paintings, prints, LP records, etc.

The twenty-two linocut prints in this series range in size from intimate to monumental, with subjects drawn from science-fiction and the history of printmaking, describing the process of letting go and moving on, all while celebrating the impact of the past.

Intricately-carved relief prints display the narrative with a lack of ambiguity in stark black and white, hand-printed without a press. This distillation and graphic quality of the imagery recalls the relief printing process as one of the earliest forms of printmaking, its importance in the dissemination of art, and its role in the expansion of a communal visual culture.

The linocut prints in this series describe the process of letting go and moving on, celebrating the impact of the past, (re)considering one's relationship to the internet, and making a case for the relevance of making new objects.