Mark Jeffery

Mark Jeffery (B. 1973, UK) is a performance artist, choreographer and curator. He is Chair of the Performance Department and Full Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1994 Mark has developed unconventional collaborations with visual artists, video, sound and code artists, dancers, and cows.

In 2012, he co-founded the language, performance, and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r). ATOM-r premiered its first work, The Operature, in 2014 at the National Museum of Health and Science, Chicago. In 2017, ATOM-r premiered Kjell Theøry at The Graham Foundation Chicago. In 2018, ATOM-r presented Rhinestone Cowboy, performed with cows at 606, Chicago.

Mark was a former member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 - 2009. Goat Island toured and taught extensively across North America and Europe. In 2019, The Chicago Cultural Center presented an exhibition dedicated to the work of Goat Island and their substantial archive.

Recent performances include: Graham Foundation, Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Chisenhale Dance Space, London, Alfred De Vrove, Prague, International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, Performance Arcade, Wellington, NZ, 606 Trail, Chicago, Gallery 400, Chicago.

He is the organisor of IN>TIME Tri Annual performance festival in Chicago.

Since Summer 2019, Mark has collaborated on a residency project at The Poor Farm, Wisconsin.

Since summer of 2018, Mark has created a performance space in his home, called Ohklahomo. The space allows for emerging and established artists to connect, make new work and always includes a dinner.

On the ground of the performances I make I seek stillness, I witness and slow and stabilize the urgency in the unstable. This is why the farmer's son dances.

2023 is my 30th year of performance making. In the last 30 years I have learned that invitation, interruption and opportunity keep me creatively evolving. 30 years of performing, collaborating, rehearsing, touring, exhibiting, curating, organizing and always questioning what it means for my body and the bodies I work with to formally capture and craft highly disciplined, focused and visually striking images that are still, slow, deliberate and always in active motion. I am a farmer’s, a herdsman son. Becoming older, I have learnt how embodied and connected I am to the farm, to the fields I was raised on. A farm started by monks over a 1000 years ago. I have rotated multiple fertile fields of creative work that include performances, exhibitions, film screenings, teaching, curatorial projects, published books and articles in journals.

Since March 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic I have learnt how to transform my practice online, to create a stage and theatre in my home. A re-wilding, relearning of what practice, care, and the creative can be, even at home, lockdown but finding the creative in the fragility of surviving and showing a new field to make from. To show my students the importance to still make work in a field of care.

My early background is integral to my performance vocabulary and my investigations into disappearing working class iconographies. The word tied is used to describe the dairy farm cottage in which I was born and raised in rural England. Our home was tied, according to a now-outmoded employment arrangement, to the owner of the land, our habitation contingent on my father's able body. I remain psych-geographically joined to this landscape of domestic and agricultural gestures and rituals, internalised images of butchered animals, milked teats, kitchen tiles, and laid hedges. In my practice, I remap and re-contextualise embodied geographies and obsolete occupational gestures, combining the personal with historical research and sampled sources to create complex visual choreographies. While steeped in history, I am fueled by an active engagement with technology, social media and ever expanding collaborations with a range of artists to create contemporary art works that resound most recently with gestures of anatomy, sex, forensics, labour and commitment of the worker. By extending my solo practice into direction and collaboration I have uncovered a vast terrain of exploration and image making on a large scale for current and future works. My work evolves through context-specific research and practice and always considers the constraints of a given site, venue or occasion. My recent large-scale collaborative projects have multiple manifestations. A given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately or simultaneously presented as a performance of fixed length, Internet art, durational live installation, film, or a printed queer publication.

I see work that I have made grow, multiply and expand, open into new and unknown territories. In these 30 years I have overseen a voice grow from a skinny, geeky, anxious, ultra shy gay boy to a man that is forceful, that cares and carries the weight of others and himself - in this body that is still anxious and still quivers, but has learnt how a quivering hand can stitch, outlining territories of focus in a patchwork landscape of materials, bodies and most recently the non human and cows.

Over the years I have seen a ground sewn, sewed, ploughed, jumped on, fallen on, taken away from, cried on, danced on. I have seen a ground where a mother has left a son, a father's eyes bruised black and blue, rib cage cracked, and part of a skull removed. On a ground of the images I make I seek stillness, I witness and see urgency in the unstable.

On the ground of the images I make I seek stillness, I witness and see urgency in the unstable. This is why the farmer's son dances.

The unknown teaches me and forces me to take risks, to be daring within a context. The ground is shaking, my body is quivering and in order to see I create visual images of stillness and arrest, tenderness, horror, beauty and anxiety, spaces of fear and control. In endings, there are new beginnings. Take the plough, cut the field and begin again. In endings I see beginnings.

Since 1996, I have been engaged in many collaborative art works and groups, ( I was core member of Chicago based International Goat Island Performance Group, performer and collaborator 1996-2009.) where the multi-layered ground of my process-based practice as a performer and choreographer has been continually altered and extended by other kinds of processing: screens, algorithms, stratas of synthetic and virtual materials, in an-always transforming topography, eventually leading to the formation, and eventually, formalization of the collective, Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality. (ATOM-r) with code artist and writer, Judd Morrissey.

As a careful strategy to co-authorship and collaboration I co – founded with Judd Morrissey (Writer, Digital Artist, Dramaturgy, Performer) and I am the choreographer and Performer of Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) 2012 -. We are a collective exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st century embodiment through performance and emerging technologies, through various contexts of Performance, Exhibition, Technology, Film, Print Publications, Photography, Site, Apps and the internet through multiple years long research and iterations. I am concerned with revealing the reality of the computationally-mediated body and in foregrounding queer histories of computing. Our use of augmented reality, an emerging platform in which virtual content is mapped onto the physical world through the intervention of a mobile app, is unique to live performance. Our process creates a deeply entangled exchange between the live body and technology. The work is inherently variable, experienced as a tightly constrained but flexible information pattern that allows for close attention, emergence and interruption. ATOM-r is constantly searching, being a collective that doesn't want to rest but to work, and to discover new forms through our research and ongoing practice of life and art.

"ATOM-r," blurs multiple lines: between performance art and theater, theater and installation art, installation art and video, video and poetry. The group aims to question formal practice, the boundaries and binaries that tend to delimit image making and performance. By confounding form, ATOM-r simultaneously grapples with historical mechanics of homosexuality and queerness, and with how queer aesthetics have carried over to a society newly augmented by technology.’ Sasha Geffen, Chicago Reader

I am a people person and I always want to learn through others. I always want to collaborate with other artists as a way to challenge the work that we make and to keep the work different and in a new space. Over the years I have collaborated with sound artists, filmmakers, lighting designers , costume designers, jewelry designers, sculptures , printers, makeup artists, zine artists, painters, scholars, writers, new media artists, performers and cows.

On the ground of the performances I make I seek stillness, I witness and slow and stabilize the urgency in the unstable. This is why the farmer's son dances.