Artist Marc Bosworth has a day job as a designer. Deadlines and clients hold plenty of space in his life, but not when he’s making art for himself. He had a year to complete a show and got started in March, working mostly on the weekends.
“People make art differently,” Bosworth said. “Some people do consider their clientele when they make art, but I think partly because of my day job being what it is, I sort of go the opposite direction. I think of it as my time to be free and do what I want to do.
“When I work in a series like this, I like to work on at least a couple of them, not necessarily at the exact same time, but because I was limited with how much space I have in my studio, I would do one and get it done, and then I would immediately do another one.”
Bosworth collected materials for decades to use in this exhibit. There is a loose order to working each piece.
“There's the comic books, the maps, the brown paper bags, the magazines, the postage stamps,” Bosworth said. “Brown paper goes down first, and then maybe some of the diagram stuff, and then maybe a comic book, and then a map element that ties them together, makes them relate to each other.”
Some of the materials explore the idea of our ephemeral identities.
“For years, when I got my oil change on my car, they would give you one to hang on the rearview mirror. At one point in my life, this was me. But then later, this was my number, and then later that was my number. So that's kind of one of the things I'm thinking about too is how your identity changes almost daily depending on the circumstances. “
His personal artistic process is different from his training as a printmaker, where things are mostly done before they’re committed to paper.
“If I know what a piece is going to look like before I start it, then I get bored making it,” Bosworth said. “I want to discover things along the way. I want the piece to kind of help me figure out what it's going to be.”
It’s rare to find a purposeful collector like Bosworth, who uses random objects. He is happy to find these bits displayed in his art.
“I collect these things so that I can make art out of them,” Bosworth said, “and I've finally been able to use up a lot of the stuff that I've had, and to me, that's what it's for, right? That's exciting to me.”
Bosworth's show runs through Friday, October 23, at CityArts in downtown Wichita.
