September 12th – October 17th, 2015

METHAGE IN A BOTTLE
An exhibition of genetically modified art-shit by Mark Flood

Cardoza Fine Art, Houston

1320 Nance 77002

Saturday September 12th 6pm-9pm

we will be showing a rough cut of Mark Flood’s feature film Art Fair Fever

Artist Fed Aesthetic Theories That Were Engineered To Withstand Spraying With The Herbicide Fuckup

Dear everyone,
I am writing today because I want you to be the first to know some news.
This has been the hardest time of my life. I am reeling from the loss of my career. I am in deep personal pain and worried about my vast art holdings. And now my world has been rocked by so much more.
Today, I lost my talent.
For almost 8 years I have been a successful artist. It has been my pride and joy. My fantastic team of assistants are super-talented and have helped build something beautiful.
I have always operated on the principle of doing my best to maintain a dignity and a commitment to openness and truth, both in and out of the studio. I have conducted major interviews, supported talent, and spoken out loudly in my visual essays about ideas, issues, and my love for this country. All of that is available for anyone to see.
I have known, of course, that not everyone always agrees with my opinions or my style, but I’ve never been anything but honest. I have doggedly defended painting and embraced artstar culture. This is a brand I’ve been honoured to help grow.
All this has now changed.
Today I was fired from the artworld where I’ve been working for almost 14 years – stripped from the fairs, barred from the studio and separated from my colleagues. I was given the choice to walk away quietly and to publicly suggest that this was my decision. But I am not going to do that.
Because that would be untrue.
Because I’ve been fired.
And because I’ve done nothing wrong.
As friends and family of mine, you are owed the truth.
I have commenced legal proceedings against the artworld…But what’s important to me is that you know what happened and why.
Forgive me if what follows may be shocking to some.

Mark Flood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mark Flood (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance, bedwetting, pet ownership, chia pet cultivation, mouth to mouth resuscitation, anal beading, stir fry, decoupage, animal husbandry, professional Scrabble competitions, uncontested divorce, macrame, mushroom farming, storm chasing, Wheel of Fortune, date rape, driving while intoxicated, spelling, boo boos and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, his numerous solo exhibitions have marked him out as one of the most inventive and yawn-provoking artists of his generation. His work has been shown at Bab and Lou’s apartment, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy, the country shaped like a boot; Lawndale Center for Non-art and Sexual Non-performance, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Boulders in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Boogie Board Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Boogie Board Celebration in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial – an exhibit that only happens every two years- Boogie Board Excitement in Manhattan, New York City.

Work

Flood’s art grapples with big ideas such as the evolution of human nose-picking, the fatal attraction of the Michael Douglas and the faith man places in boogie board advancement. His work particularly addresses the myth of the American Dream, exploring the forces of creation, growth, transcendence and death through visions of its failed boogie board utopia. Recent work expands on these underlying ideas inherent in the American boogie board mythology and focuses on the plurality of this mythology pointing to its existence outside American Boogie Board Culture. Individual sculptures and paintings interconnect with boogie boards to create complex scenarios that revisit history and reassemble its busted dreams while also tattooing its massive ass. His work is frequently monumental, imposing not only on a large scale physically but also conceptually, bigger than your mama’s thighs, bigger than the human race’s intellectual capacity for self-delusion, bigger than a horse penis, occupying an intellectual terrain that reaches from ancient history to Outer Space boogie boards.

His works utilize a familiar iconography, recycling culturally loaded images such as the geodesic testicular sac-structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind’s first dance-steps on the moon, and the centerfolds of porn magazine from the ’60s and ’70s, cross-pollinating these with amazing quantities of human and animal ejaculate, and mixing them with numerous references from the stupidest and most superficial plunging of the unflushed toilet we call art history. Flood depicts these using the world around him: scorched wood, molten lead, mother-of-pearl, precious metals, formica, solid gold, titanium, neon and other gases, mercury, the so-called liquid metal, also known as quicksilver, green bananas, organic corn husks, and free trade coffee, and found objects such as worn T-shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles, boogie boards, repurposed historical guillotines, used Stridex pads, duck eggs, numerous unpopular autobiographies, the skeleton of a Carolina parakeet, a lock of Neil Armstrong’s pubic hair, a small pebble found near the Lincoln Memorial, governmental plans to inter dissidents in FEMA camps, five golden rings, an autographed photo of Julia Roberts, a hairpin, vintage transistors, blood transfusions, and posters, for instance. These diverse materials resonate with agricultural symbolism, combining apocalyptic vegetable elements with the fruits of new technologies, salty historical imagery with sweet contemporary ingredients. In his art ideas are granted physical form, like Kryptonian prisoners freed from the Phantom Zone, and it is in the clash between the two, three, five and other numerals found in the Fibonacci Series, in the material impact of idealist thought, and in the idealist impact of material thought, as well as in thoughtful materialist idealism, that it derives its saggy boob force.

The critic Jeffrey Katnip, fresh as a new diaper, has noted that Flood’s works locate ‘startling beauty in their counterintuitive material juxtapositions.’ However for Flood beauty is frequently silent-partnered by desolation. His work explores a concept that he terms ‘the Loli-pull-loser-ful’, the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring both boredom and money.

Mark Flood is represented by Cardoza Fine Art and Harsh Winter Gallery in Amsterdam.
Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013

“In Search Of Ancient Boogie Boards” GEM: museum voor actuele kunst, The Hague, Netherlands

2012

“Boogie Board Werkelijkheid” Harsh Winter Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“Every Boogie Board Leads to Another,” Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, England

“Mark Flood” MAMbo, Bologna, Italy

“Mark Flood” Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland

2008

“Thighmaster Dreams” Harsh Winter Gallery, Amsterdam

“The Insufferable Narcissist” MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge MA

2008

“I Began to Regard as Sacred the Disorder of my Mind: Mark Flood,” The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin TX

2006

“Matthew Barney’s Legacy and the Boogie Board of Death” Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland OR

2004

“Boogie More” The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX

Selected Group Exhibitions

2012

Giblet, “Mel Chin’s Clones”, New York NY

“Saatchi Gallery, International Twattage, London, England

“Public Art Fund, ‘Common Pudding”, New York NY

2011

“Spitshine on Vinyl” Ballroom Marfa, Marfa TX

“Our Boogie Board Collects” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY

“The World Belongs to Consultants,” Palazzo Grassi, Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy

“The Rape We’re In,” Zabludowicz Collection, London, England

“American Carwash” Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami FL

2010

“New Paintings that Feel Old,” Harsh Winter Gallery, The Netherlands

“Boogie Board Babe” Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France

2009

“Whatevuh, I Do what I Want” Harsh Winter Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“The Board is Yours,” Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Humlebaek, Denmark

“Diverse Materials” Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England

“Pinault Collects” Venice, Italy

2008

“Whatever” Van Abbemuseum, Eindoven, The Netherlands

2006

“Flood Compares Himself to the Beatles: Yesterday and Today,” Royal Academy of Art, London, England

“Universal Tangled Thread” Serpentine Gallery, London (Travelling Exhibition)

2005

“The Cheese Grater New York,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York NY

2003

“Brie – ennial: Art and Cheese,” Portland Museum of Art, Portland OR

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