Mark Flood is an interdisciplinary artist known for making paintings, collages, sculptures, videos and music. His punk sensibility and use of language in particular is informed by his participation in the Houston punk scene of the 80’s where he first designed concert flyers and then performed in the band Culturcide, under the pseudonym Perry Webb. Later working at the Menil Collection as a museum assistant, this exposure to art history influenced his subsequent citation of art historical references.

Flood appropriates many cultural symbols in his work, to confront the use of images as tools for manipulation and control. His assemblages, inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell in particular, offer ironic critiques of the art world by undermining its verbosity and pomposity. Flood’s paintings and collages of the 1980s and 1990s transformed corporate, pornographic and celebrity imagery into provocative hybrids of art and consumer culture using found materials: signs, advertisements, and magazines. His more recent compositions critique contemporary culture by appropriating its visual language, for instance rendering an American flag blurred to question the viability of the American dream, or rendering text slogans on canvases that mimic and distort conventional advertising. Yet, rather than producing artwork to stake a political position, Flood’s work co-opts mass media in order to reveal the beauty to be found in the complexity of modern society.