An exclusive interview with artist Mark Flood by Leo Fitzpatrick

Leo Fitzpatrick – So you’re finishing the final installment of your strange Manhattan gallery, MARK FLOOD RESENTS.

Mark Flood – It’s not over yet. The last show is going to be in my Miami Beach studio during Art Basel. 633 Washington. It’s called EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE MEN, it’s the sequel to the NYC show we just did called IRRATIONAL WOMEN.

Leo Fitzpatrick – And how is it having a gallery?

Mark Flood – It’s a pain but it’s worth it I guess. I wanted to put up a lot of other peoples art from my collection, and I did that. It was great to see it on a wall, because most of it lives in warehouses. Another side effect was that it got me very interested in television. Once I put the live cameras and the microphone in the gallery the voyeur aspect became so heavy that I started thinking in terms of the TV show. But we really couldn’t go any further there without rewiring the gallery for more bandwidth, so I just put it aside for another day. It says Chelsea Shore because the live feed reminded me of Jersey Shore. Jersey Shore blended with Andy Warhol‘s Sleep, because most of the gallerinos sit around doing nothing all day. But as Warhol discovered watching people do nothing is fascinating.

Leo Fitzpatrick – You had the mattresses in there.

Mark Flood – Yes. I learned from the Insider Art Fair that looking at a painting from a mattress is a very nice way to look at a painting. So I think I may put mattresses in all my exhibits from now on.

Leo Fitzpatrick – What new kinds of work are you doing?

Mark Flood – The Aged Paintings are out now. They are paintings of corporate logo grids, and other things, where the paint is heavily cracked and, in some cases, half fallen off. They look unstable but they’re very stable. They look ancient but they’re new. I developed the idea out of my interest in Joe Cornell boxes. He used to bake his boxes in his kitchen oven for hours to make the paint on them crack. I think the aesthetic effect of the technique is to cool off hot political topics by making them seem to recede in time. I made one about how the banks and the NYSE conspired to crush Occupy. It looks like it all happened a long time ago.

Leo Fitzpatrick – What are the Spiderman paintings about?

Mark Flood – Those are some of what I call Meme Paintings. So far, mainly with the Spiderman Meme. I see these paintings as monuments to the vanishing meme culture. It’s already rapidly receding into the past. People think I made these memes, but I didn’t; I just stole them off the internet. My contribution was figuring out how to take tiny little memes and fix them so they could be printed big on a canvas. Not so easy. I do have a different body of work in the pipeline that has memes created by me. Most of them are disturbing pics off the net, a lot of gore and porn, and the text are nuggets of current art theory. They’re funny. I don’t know what to call them yet, something like Theoretical Memes. They are gnarly.

Mark Flood Resents at Miami Beach opens today until Dec 7th at 633 Washington Avenue at 7th, Miami Beach. Artwork Mark Flood, photo Trevor Good and interview Leo Fitzpatrick

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