Artist Detailed Info: Mark Solotroff

Mark Solotroff is a Chicago-based artist who works in visual, sound, and performance mediums. As a sound artist/musician, he founded the experimental industrial noise band Intrinsic Action in Chicago, in 1984, and he launched BLOODYMINDED, an aggressive, extreme electronics group, in New York City, in 1995. Solotroff is the vocalist in the darkly atmospheric doom metal band Anatomy of Habit, a group in which he actually puts his singing voice to work. An active band on the live front, the heavily anticipated debut Anatomy of Habit LP is due out in summer 2011. Solotroff rarely performs solo, under his own name, but those familiar with him know of his obsession with microphones and feedback loops.

In all of his creative work, Solotroff has explored various types of open and closed systems. For numerous years, he has made art about blood. After moving back to Chicago, from Brooklyn, New York, in 1997, he began a job that required extensive air travel. Solotroff spent a great deal of time pausing from small drawings on airplane tray tables, staring down from 35,000 feet, and considering how cities spread out. Looking at his drawings and his paintings, as well as at biology and medical texts that mapped out cellular life, he saw a relationship to how cities grow. He supplemented his library with urban planning and architecture books, which were filled with illustrations that seemingly blurred into those from the medical texts that he had previously pored over. The resulting visual work is affected by his investigation into the correlation between the natural progression of cells, the spread of viruses – historic, contemporary, and speculative – and the organic and planned expansion of cities. Solotroff has developed a personal graphic language, which references biological, architectural, and theoretical elements, and which uses both pattern and random direction to construct inner and outer spaces.

With his microphone performances, Solotroff has extended the reference to other types of systems, primarily focusing on loops, both literal and metaphorical. Like his drawings and his paintings, his performances isolate repetition within a system. Parallel to forms of computer programming, he recognizes that whenever a process must be repeated, a loop is set up to carry out the procedure. And similar to how a program has a main loop and a series of minor loops, nested within, Solotroff’s process creates and combines these speculative loops that yield both controlled and unpredictable results.

http://bloodlust.blogspot.com/
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Mark+Solotroff
http://www.myspace.com/officialbloodyminded

← Go Back