Prents of darkness

>> The beauty and brutality of sculptor
Mark Prent’s silicone simulacra

IN OVER HIS HEAD: Mark Prent (R) and sculptures in “Lagoon”

A rope-bound amputee, butchered torsos in a meat locker, horrific fusions of man and animal—all of them disturbingly real in detail and scale, and moulded from the body of the artist himself. Through the ’70s and into the ’80s, the Polish-born Canadian Prent was a lightning rod for disgust from some quarters, deep admiration from others.

Today, Prent divides his time between life-moulding instruction at his alma mater Concordia, providing materials and technical services from home/atelier Pink House Studios in rural Vermont, and diving—literally—into bold, new artistic endeavours. Public displays of his work have become less frequent in the last decade, so his contributions to the rebooted Usine 106U collective show simply demand a look-see.

These include an untitled sculpture using Prent’s recurring heads-within-heads motif, a colour poster of his early-’70s effort “Child’s Toy” (a wart-covered, truncated doll) and a large drawing of his rarely seen sculpture “Calibrated Man.”

The latter is notably not a preparatory sketch—surprisingly, Prent avoids those, despite the complexity, and complications, his work entails. “If I fulfilled the idea in the drawing,” he says, “there would be almost no point in doing it as a sculpture, because it would have resolved itself. Yes, there might be a technical challenge, but the joy, the fun, the excitement of creating it would be gone.”

The fourth Prent piece at 106U, a large-format, highly crafted photo print of 1972’s “Thawing Out,” is of particular resonance. It was originally produced to raise legal-defence funds for Avrom Isaacs, the Toronto gallery owner whose exhibit of Prent’s work led to criminal charges of—get this—“exhibiting a disgusting object.”

FLAYTIME: “Degloved”

Objects and objections

Since those days, Prent has explored the sublime beauty of nature and the surreal physics of acrobats. But don’t think he’s let the darkness disappear. Prent has lately delved deep into the live-performance applications of his sculptures. He’s particularly keen about collaborations with his filmmaker son, Jesse. “The pieces are too complex, or they get destroyed in the process of the performance, and I don’t want to rebuild them—so the only way they exist afterwards is through film.”

He describes at length “Lagoon,” which involves Prent and his silicone simulacra, each painted half black, half white, writhing slowly underwater and in thick mud. Following his son’s desktop edit, “the figures blended into one another perfectly, so if you didn’t know how it was done, it’s really wild to watch.”

Another piece, “Degloved,” involved Prent tearing the flesh off the back of a duplicate of himself. “It’s rough,” he laughs. “It’s brutal.”

COLD COMFORT: “Thawing Out”

Too brutal for the public? Or, alternately, exactly what the art world needs to bring in new, much-needed audiences—young audiences, inured by horror flicks and heavy metal, and bored to death of listless landscapes in oil.

“The museums and art galleries don’t give the public enough credit for understanding this kind of stuff. Some of the best work being done has to be done underground, because it’s not getting publicly viewed! I understand that galleries have to sell to exist. But museums don’t have that problem. They have a free ride! They should be showing as great a variety of work as possible.

“What my wife says, and I agree with her 100 per cent, is that they’re always showing whatever is least objectionable. They’d rather not deal with two or three people that demand to know why my work might be art, and why their taxpayer’s money is going towards it. They don’t want to trade that off for hundreds or thousands of people who come for whatever reason, and are fascinated.”