Street Artist street art is so essentialbecause it

Street Artist “street art is so essential—because it creates a visual heartbeat in the city by people who are living in it, rather than just marketing to it. ” Mark Jenkins 1

• Jenkins first began experimenting with tape as a casting medium for creating sculpture in 2003 while living in Rio de Janeiro. • He made figures and placed them in a garbage cans to draw attention to the children that were living in the streets there. • He was immediately interested in the reactions he got from people viewing his art. Mark Jenkins 2

• Mark is a 41 -year-old artist, who has worked as a saxophonist and a web designer prior to becoming one of the foremost artists in the street installation movement. • His art is based on surprising people with the unexpected in a familiar urban environment. • He wants people to look up for a second from their mobile phones and engage with the world around them. Mark Jenkins 3

• In 2004 he moved back to Washington DC and in 2005 he began working on the Storker Project, a series in which clear casts of toy babies are installed in different cities to interact with their surrounding environment. Mark Jenkins 4

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• In 2006 Jenkins began the Embed Series. • The tape casts were filled with newspaper and cement and dressed to create hyper realistic sculptural duplicates of himself. • These new life-like sculpture installations created confusion causing some passersby to make calls to 911 which caused police and sometimes rescue units to arrive on his "stage". It is also during this time Jenkins gained worldwide media attention for his work. Mark Jenkins 10

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• Q: What's it like seeing a sculpture of yourself on the street? • A: "I love having a more personal connection with my sculptures. . . you see yourself projected into these urban situations, it's like an out-of-body experience. " Mark Jenkins 12

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Video Clips • http: //vimeo. com/35246173 • http: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=1 Pn. XCq. On. YVU Mark Jenkins 18