Monachopsis: Otherworldly Relics from Imaginary Worlds
Mark Logan’s June 28th Art Show from 4-8pm at Central School Project In Bisbee
Welcome to the first installation of Strange Beauty, a blog about the arts and creativity in Bisbee. I’m applying the word “strange” to beauty because I want to signal that beauty isn’t just a straight forward thing, but is mysteriously awkward. I believe there is an acquired learning of knowledge to experiencing beauty, the appreciation of art and one’s taste in things. This subjectivity “I like what I like” is not innocent. It’s built on our experiential and academic learning; our choices to engage are to learn or to not learn, translating into “I like or I don’t like”, or even “I love or I hate”. With 98% of our consciousness unconscious, the symmetries and imbalances of beauty are hidden in our stories, and possibly even other dimensions embedded in the infinities around us, and passing through us. Through this monthly blog we will explore why beauty in Bisbee is so extraordinary and multifaceted. It’s a universal take for any reader. But Bisbee is located over thousands of miles of ghost tunnels from over a hundred years of mining, caves that preceded them pacing through time and space their crystalline beacons of copper, metamorphic and sedimentary beneath us. Attracted like gravity to this landscape below and its buildings and mountains above, a critical mass of extremely good musicians, visual artists, poets and other writers, film makers and many others in the arts from philosophers to homespun creative folks, and critically, a supple audience and diversity of art collectors. Many are uniquely self-educated, and many are formally educated while also uniquely self educated on top of that. Reflecting Bisbee itself grinding its dreams through the tunnels and caves below the purple shadow of our feet while creating the arts and businesses above. And for those visiting Bisbee discovering their intersection with these energies and people, a Bisbee consciousness and unconsciousness uniting our experience in strange beauty.
One of the many gifts Bisbee is bestowing on us for the month of June, 2025 is a cognitively enthralling and diverse show of art objects at Central School Project by long time Bisbee artist Mark Logan. He is best known for his soft sculptures of animals, dolls and toys. He and his spouse Hywel had their Stitches toy store in Bisbee for 18 years, as well as being shown in Plushie art shows all over the country, with two of his pieces collected by the Smithsonian in Washington DC.. Mark has made and sold over 9000 of his patternless soft sculptures. You can still find him on Etsy.
Yet, on Saturday June 28th from 4-8pm, CSP will be hosting Logan’s first solo art show, interestingly titled Monachopsis: Otherworldly Relics from Imaginary Worlds. The word Monachopsis (pronounced mon-uh-kop-sis) is a pop neologism that describes the feeling of being out of place, or not belonging. Derived from the Ancient Greek mona-khós (single, solitary) and (view, sight.) Its construction is implied to describe a feeling of being a misfit in your surroundings, even if you’re surrounded by others who seem similar, yet a sense that you don’t truly fit in. Will these diverse artworks also retrieve these sensations, not just Mark’s personal identities of feeling these qualities while making them? There is a bit of suspense to discover if his various artworks display such a simultaneously human and alien aesthetics of intrinsically both present and remote viewing. It may depend on your own experiences of mind and process, and how much you are willing to delve into them. It may depend on personal coincidence which pieces of art become “your favorites,” and some of that experience will be right before, during, and after the reception, informing your personal nostalgia.
Part of Mark Logan’s prowess in making things is the sensory calibration of his imagination which is unable to filter out large portions of the sensory input flooding his mind in real time all the time, using all that data in making his art. He pulls from all the shapes, sounds and images that constantly flood into his consciousness — improvisationally re-articulating their myriad semiotics into the expressions of his stuffed sculptures, paintings, and collages which he rips the paper by hand for into intuitive shapes. He doesn’t use scissors, or straight line measurement in his collages, just as he freestyles his way through his stuffed animal figures while making them without craft patterns. As an autistic gay man the kaleidoscope of Mark’s intelligence is a polymath Santa’s Workshop of neurodivergent tasks and augmentations verging together into his often joyful, sometimes dark contemporary artworks of strange beauty.
This one night only show will feature about 200 of Mark’s one of a kind stuffed animals, over a dozen unique ceramic pieces, paintings, found-object sculptures, and collages. There will also be piñatas, a photo-booth, giveaways, and some guests will dress up extravagantly, while others will be dressed in costume, all of which is encouraged and free to the public. This is the first opportunity to see Mark’s paintings and ceramic sculptures featuring a number of original techniques and material juxtapositions he’s developed more recently. Like many Bisbee area creatives, continuing education is imperative at Cochise County College’s nationally respected art program and facilities, particularly at the Douglas Campus where Mark continues to operate. He has advanced much of his new areas of work there with new materials, genres, and techniques in hard sculpture, ceramics, assemblage, painting and drawing with accomplished artist-teachers like Tate Rich and Ash Dahlke.
Mark says he’s very much still learning ceramics, but he’s been playing around with using unconventional materials in the process. Some of these are lost cardboard and lost loofah-sponge sintering methods of fusing original forms. There are a few pieces that are the ceramic piece alone, but most of the works utilize the ceramic work as the centerpiece of an assemblage artwork. He didn’t plan any of these out from the start, but is guided serendipitously through his intuitive processes like mentioned before. Though Mark thinks the different genres of work in his show to be so different that the viewer will think different artists made them, I think I’ll recognize the generative intuition of all his different series as I get to know him and his work. Just as it’s one’s techniques that materially creates style, so do the rivers of our consciousness.
Mark started making the soft sculptures (or stuffed animals) as gifts for his niece and nephew for xmas 2002. He didn’t know how to sew, so you could see the stitches, and that’s when he decided to call them “Stitches”. When he and his husband moved to Bisbee in 2003, he made a few stuffed animals and collages which they set up in grassy park trying to sell them. The stuffed animals sold well and he enjoy making them, so mostly he focused on that for the next 20 years.
Because Mark Logan didn’t, and still doesn’t use formal design patterns, each time is like figuring out a puzzle of how to create the shapes from fabric and imagination. The fun part for Logan in everything he makes is the process itself. He doesn’t plan or sketch anything he makes except paintings to the degree that this is what paintings are. In this last piece we see a wall hung sculpture that is a ceramic and found object piece. Mark Logan is really interested in color and shape and texture in everything he creates. The theme of this show is “Otherworldly relics from imaginary worlds”. The artworks don’t share much in common on the surface except that he created them all. For him the unifying bit is that they all seem like treasures found on a space wreck in the far future on another planet. Though of course as appreciators of art we will be flying our own way there.
Please return next month for Strange Beauty: Creativity And The Arts In Bisbee. Please share with your fellow travelers of the arts and all things interesting.
Ken Boe is a Bisbee artist and writer. Support his work at patreon.com/kenboe including his Poem At Night, his new blogs and videos, and his soon to be relaunched Bisbee Poetry Normalization Project (#BPNP) infamously normalizing a presence of poetry all over Bisbee and beyond. Find a poem on an old telegraph or telephone pole, in a shop window, or bulletin board. You may see where to get his artwork locally at kenboe.com, or buy directly by scrolling down at the online artfarmiowa.com/store where he held a residency summer of 2024.