Mark Booth utilizes poetry, performance, audio, painting, and drawing to shift our perception of words. In his work, words are presented both as signifiers and something concrete onto themselves. Language becomes music in his audio and performance work, while it becomes something physical in his paintings and drawings. In Thanking, Booth has edited improvised spoken performances to form a rhythmic and symphonic auditory experience. The overlapping of similar words and phrases spoken by different actors functions similarly to the repetition of language in his drawings. These chunks of text become stackable units, in a sense, which he orders and reorders to interfere with our sense of time, pacing, and meaning. This phenomena is present in both the spoken and drawn language pieces, creating a visual and auditory rhythm which is consistent across media.

About the Artist

Mark Booth teaches writing, sound, and performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown Adds Donna in Chicago, Kunstverein Koelnberg in Koln, oqbo in Berlin, Dominican University in River Forest, IL, Schalter Gallery in Berlin, and the College of DuPage. He has performed at Brown University, Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, and the Chicago Cultural Center. He holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.