Mark Salvatus develops his works in the field of site-specificity. On one hand he treats the urban environment as a site for his interventions. At the same time he responds to the features of the city, its habits and sequence of co-existing spaces to feed his projects.
Read MoreHe positions his works in the universally accessible realm of the everyday, such as the lives and lifestyles of ordinary people. An example is his ongoing series, Wrapped, which started in 2007 defines a practice based on the community. Mark extends this project beyond the locale in which the idea germinated from and continues over to the places of his travels such as Massachusetts, Yokohama, Bangkok, Quiapo, Barcelona and Bandung. As much as the evidence of gesture and touch determines the underlying current of his works, Mark indexes this visual presence with a visible absence. Even in an overarching process of creating imprints over realist representation, he shows that the notions of presence and situation are key.
Exhibitions that followed his approach to Wrapped continue to investigate the abstraction of presence in the form of outlining objects and individuals to come up with a vast index about traces of peculiarities of our contemporary civilization. Mark works on subtle alterations to pre-existing urban structures, providing new encounters in the motions of living in the city. With poetic interventions, he allows us to navigate not just our relation to architectural configurations but makes us see the city not as continuum but an arrangement of spaces where different functions and phenomena are inseparably linked. Projects relating to marginal histories and cultural operations also defines his current projects with prisons and particular objects related to particular places, presenting a form of specificity in terms of aesthetic gaze rather than being utopian in character.
Having been granted with residencies since 2007, Mark has spent time advancing his research-based practice and exhibiting in Australia, South Korea, Spain, Indonesia, Jordan and the United states. He acknowledges his process to this chain of residency awards, adapting to the experiences on his travels. The resulting works may be seen as a foray to view the world in equivalent terms, through the language of contemporary urban culture.
