American artist Mark Jenkins creates sculptural street installations that often draw the attention of passersby. His approach to street art includes using the street as a stage where his faceless figures seamlessly interact with the surrounding environment.
Staged in provocative positions, his lifelike sculptures are meant to make people question the reality. His artworks can be observed as a social experiment, with the objective of engaging the people. “I like getting people to question their surroundings, what is real and what isn’t. These days, people are so buried in their mobile phones and I just wanted to get them to look up,” Jenkins said in an interview with Reuters in 2012. “So at the beginning, I was collecting social data about people’s reactions. But six years later, these images are more about poetry, of capturing a magical moment.”
As for the sculptural process, Jenkins uses a “dry-casting” process he discovered while he was still studying. By wrapping the objects – dolls, toy animals and his own body – in plastic wrap and then tape, Jenkins creates an external cast that he removes then reassembles into ghostly sculptures. His work has been described as quirky, macabre, and situationist.
