Mark Sengbusch (Cranbrook)

Untitled, 2008
Bungee cord wall weaving installation

My name is Mark Sengbusch. I’m originally from Rochester, New York. My work has changed a lot over the past twenty years that I’ve been making paintings. I started off as a kid making mazes a lot. It’s funny how you notice in your later life that things come back to what you did when you were younger. I don’t know why I was really interested in mazes; it was just something that I did. So now I’ve gone into weaving.

To go into a more chronological thing: after I graduated from the College for Creative Studies in 2002, I started a gallery in Corktown, where I made 101 paintings a week for 20 weeks, because I thought that quantity was very important. I learned that from this book, “Art and Fear.” And also from Mitch Cope, who I had a great class with at CCS. How I like to put it is, if you dig enough holes, you’ll find gold – eventually. So I think that that happened.

Now that I came to Cranbrook, what I figured I would do is, why dig so many random holes, just go right to the mine. So I’ve been working on single pieces a lot more. The piece behind me is a reverse Plexiglas inlaid in the wall, which happened after thinking a lot about the art object and the importance of the physical art object. And I’m thinking more about the context or about the architecture, so I kind of scrapped the whole art object thing and went into that. Video games have always been a big thing for me, I’ve been playing video games for a long time. My high score in Tetris is much higher as a child as my adult career. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to beat that – 810,000! And so I’ve been using that as a parallel with weaving. I got a nice big loom, and I’m trying to make this parallel between video games, or more specifically computers and early weavings, because the computer is a loom, it’s based on weaving techniques. So that’s where I’m at now – I’m weaving and playing Tetris.