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Marc Atkins

Biography

Marc Atkins is an English artist, photographer, videographer and poet. Atkins has lived and worked for many years in London, but has also spend extended periods of time in Rome, Detroit, New York, Warsaw and Paris.

Atkins's web-site: http://marcatkins.com/index.html

"Through photography, video, film, drawing and text, I have looked to make manifest the characters and elements I see occupying the place, the pause, the precise point of crossover between states of existence. It is usually in the redolence of a room or the multi layering of the city that I find this field of the invisible and the latent forms which become my images. These images can be seen as the lost frames of a film, elements of an endless performance, or the few discovered pages of a missing text, each suggesting a story which continues beyond its borders. This place is a house with many floors, from its countless rooms emerge figures of disturbing and sensual character, each acting out their distinctive cycle, its myriad windows look out onto cities and landscapes that are at once elegant and desolate. These are images located below the surface of immediate visibility, they are images of subjective states."

Video

Bibliography

Solo Books

  • Silent Street, prose poetry (Shearsman, 2018)
  • Catalogue, images and prose poetry, inc. essays on Atkins’ work by Louis Armand,Paul Buckley, Sophie Gilmartin, Michael Hrebeniak, John Kinsella, Jock McFadyen,Rod Mengham, Jonathan Monroe, Clive Phillpot, Tadeusz Pióro, Evie Salmon, Nikki Santilli, Iain Sinclair, Martin Solotruk and Michel Delville (Collections artistiques de l'Université de Liège)
  • The Prism Walls, prose poetry (Contraband)
  • The Logic of the Stairwell, prose poetry (Shearsman)
  • Thirteen, images, with texts by thirteen writers (Do-Not Press)
  • The Teratologists, images and text (Panoptika)

Collaborative Books

  • Liquid City, images, with texts by Iain Sinclair (Reaktion)
  • Still Moving, images, with texts by Rod Mengham (Veer Books)
  • Warszawa, images, with poetry by Tadeusz Piòro and Andrzej Sosnowski(Wig-press)

Work anthologised in:

  • The World's Top Photographers: Nudes, also inc. Bourdin, Rankin, Rheims (RotoVision)
  • The Nude, also inc. Bill Brant & Ralph Gibson (RotoVision).

Catalogues

  • Interstice, solo exhibition catalogue (British Council)
  • Faces of Mathematics, solo photography (Panoptika)
  • Equivalents, solo exhibition catalogue (Gallery FF)
  • FABS: 1999-2002, catalogue of Fabs Association, Poland (Fabs)
  • Royal College of Art Fashion Catalogue, joint photography (RCA)
  • The Society of Scottish Artists exhibition catalogue
  • Winter-New York exhibition/performance catalogue

Video

Film and videography (selection):

  • ‘Nothing Stranger' (collab. Rod Mengham) 4:21 2016
  • ‘False Lights' (collab. Rod Mengham) 2:51 2016
  • ‘Deserted Road' (music by Stefano Guzzetti) 6:08 2016
  • ‘Where Suns Lie' (collab. Rod Mengham) 5:21 2015
  • 'Distort' (music by Stefano Guzzetti) 6:44 2015
  • 'Fascia in Do Minore' (music by Stefano Guzzetti) 6:07 2012
  • 'Underlie_01' 23:29 2011
  • 'Underlie_02' 31:13 2011
  • 'Underlie_04' 30:00 2011
  • 'Pro Tempore' 31:20 2010
  • 'The Unchanging Day' 30:21 2009
  • 'Between States' 4:19 2009
  • 'More Dark Than Matter' 15:19 2009
  • 'Delivering the Device' (collab. Rod Mengham) 1:50 2009
  • 'Without' 4:41 2008
  • 'Impasse' 7:37 2008
  • 'Une' 0:55 2008
  • 'Quiet, This Still Air' 6:20 2007
  • 'Your Concrete Arms' 5:45 2007
  • 'A Place of Futures' 6:20 2005
  • 'Orphée' 3:50 2004
  • 'Scratch' 50:00 2003
  • 'Space, space' 1:30:00, 2003
  • 'Sounding Pole' (collab. Rod Mengham) 4:00 2003
  • 'A Moments Tribute' (collab. Rod Mengham) 6:00 2002
  • 'Bal' (collab. Rod Mengham) 18:02 2001
  • 'Work in the Fields' (collab. Rod Mengham) 4:00 2001
  • 'Such Days' 12:04 1999
  • 'The Second Floor' 27:00 1999
  • 'Rodinsky's Mirror', 30:00 1999
  • 'The Claybury Inferno', 60:00 1999
  • 'Through the Corner of an Eye' 48:03 1998
  • 'Et Seqq.', 12:00 1995
  • 'Trace', 14:06 1995
  • 'Chemical Wedding', 10:06 1994
  • 'Kissing Echo', 2:07 1994
  • 'Ghost Muse', 7:00 1994
  • 'A Further Silence', 10:05 1993
  • 'Apply as time goes', 8:07 1993

Sound works:

  • 'Cast Multitrack 0111' 1:27 2012
  • 'xxcc 34 Random Piano' 29:23 2012
  • 'Survey01' 9:06 2012
  • 'SlowFall310212 2' 3:40 2011
  • 'L'air d'octobre' 4:51 2010
  • 'Street Machine' 22:20 2010
  • 'Short Noise' 5:45 2009
  • 'Last Days' 15:00 2004
  • 'London Dec 29 1998' 16:00 2004
  • 'Chemical Wedding' 5:00 2003
  • 'Silo' 7:00 2002
  • 'Equation' 5:00 2001
  • 'Manifest' - Un Phantoms CD 6:00 1999
  • 'Un Phantoms'-Un Phantoms CD 20:00 1998
  • 'Logos People', 10:00 1996
  • 'Outsiders I, II & III', each 6:00 1995
  • 'A line in the Dust', 20:00 1994
  • 'Ghost', 7:00 1994
  • 'The Peopled Streets', 8:00 1994

Other links:

Sample Text

A Note

Come, let us bend a little, let us pry into each other’s minds, the waychildren do, we will play beside one another for a while, and become
allied in a singular world.

 

From The Prism Walls (Contraband)

Reviews

‘This fascinating, intoxicating and often hallucinatory book ranks amongst the best prosepoetry collections of the last half-century. Atkins is a Surrealist visionary whose prosecreates a murmuring dream in every sentence, a visual universe in every paragraph. HisLogic of the Stairwell takes you into a world of verbi-voco-visual intrigues that explore themechanisms of perception and memory while blurring accepted boundaries between thenarrative and the lyrical, the sensuous and the philosophical, the essential and theresidual.’ — Michel Delville, author of The American Prose Poem

‘Atkins’ texts are unprecedented. His work gets stronger, more varied in tone, moreversatile in every way. He has gone from a studied neutrality of registration to morepersonal inflections, emphatic, insistent, uncompromising in their eclectic mixing ofregisters, choosing stark combinations of abstract and concrete because the truth can onlybe delivered that way.’ — Rod Mengham

‘Through the playfulness of Atkins’ language and images, we are coaxed beyond thebackwash of experience and our lost paradises. Apparently accessible language requires rereading.Curiosity overwhelms passivity. Against a threateningly heavy backdrop of literaryand personal history, Atkins’ style of uneven rhythms (in syntax and staging), lights ourway.’ — Nikki Santilli

‘I took my time reading the Logic of the Stairwell, it's not a book you should get through inone go. Beautiful and moving, with a lot of variety in tempo. Some passages are so dense,so packed with potential meanings, that they just go by me, but I look forward to returningto them. I think that the greatest pleasure for me as a reader, apart from the imagery assuch, was from the buildup of tension in a paragraph, and then the release taking anunexpected direction and form. A sly alteration, substitution, play on words and idioms,bringing Ashbery's procedures to mind. This is much stronger, to my mind, than thetypically surrealist metaphors and the syntax they entail, and of which you have used quitea few. But these are just technical remarks. The book is wonderful, profound, real in themost intimate, emotional sense, without being obtrusive about this. A difficult pleasure,and all the more pleasurable for that.’ — Tadeusz Pioro, poet, prose writer, columnist,literary historian and translator

'The thick detail of Atkins language lends his writing to prose poetry, often with asides ofshort sentences, to add whimsy and ever more detail to the worlds he creates.' — Review by Sam Murphy, Stride magazine

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