Mark Schatz Untitled Landscape Device -- HEDGE

“For the last five years my work has been revolving around the issue of identity, particularly a suburban American identity, using processes rooted in the idea of fabrication. Fabrication as a concept conveys pragmatic connotations of making and constructing but it also carries undercurrents of deception, delusion, and utopian fantasy. Broadly, the product of fabrication is our built environment.When this environment is interrupted, fragmented, and rearranged, we can begin to ask questions about how these metaphors operate and how they reflect on ourselves.

Like many American families, mine moved often in pursuit of better education, better jobs, and better neighborhoods. I continue to move frequently with my family as an adult and we make and remake our lives, again and again. As my identity and relationship to place is constantly displaced I am redefined, reinstated, and recontextualized in new places that are already familiar in their newness. In this work I alternately draw from, respond to, and subvert the devices of place-making that structure these built environments.”