Tree-men-do-us: May 2011

Thursday, May 26, 2011

A Strange, Re-Marko-ble Gift

       At a five corner intersection near North Ave. in Milwaukee, on the third floor of a historical building is an installation of art that is at risk of never being seen or appreciated. This installation is on the brink of being disassembled and the objects discarded.
      The artist is Mark Buelow, known in the Milwaukee East Side community as Marko Anglo. Marko has a long, colorful and immensely creative relationship with the local neighborhood and art community. At a time in his life, Marko started collecting artifacts of Wisconsin daily life. The installation is years of carefully collected and arranged artifacts from Wisconsin urban and rural estates, artifacts that are, to the artist, enshrouded in the collective histories, memories, and spirit of the people who once included them in their lives. With these objects, Marko created a magical, fanciful environment on the third floor of this historic building, an “atmosphere” of art he describes as the ‘Art Ark”. Each of the thousands of objects in the Art Ark have been placed and arranged with intent and purpose to each other and the space in which they reside, a collective artistic neural network. Marko, in his unassuming everyday creativity, has succeeded in creating an environment specifically for the purpose of providing creative and spiritual inspiration for others including artists. It is a remarkable, transformative environment to experience and it risks never being experienced by more than a handful of people.
      I am the photographer with whom Marko has shared his atmospheres. I asked him to allow me to put the wonder of his atmosphere's in context in his blog as photos are a remote second to the experience of being among the groupings that comprise the whole of what is truly a living installation of art and spirit. The environment and the artist are genius.

Katherine Mendez