Mark Shorter (as Renny Kodgers)

Photo by Jurgen Kerkovius

Mark Shorter works across sculpture, painting and performance, drawing on a grotesque and unsettling humour to unpick established social conventions, propose critique—and make us laugh. To do all three, Mark and his self-created identities—including the bawdy country music singer Renny Kodgers, the quixotic journeyman Tino La Bamba, and the time-travelling landscape painting critic Schleimgurgeln—regularly perform in non-traditional venues, which reflects a core concern of Mark’s practice: to consider the function of art both inside and outside conventional modes of display. When he’s performing as Mark Shorter, Mark is a lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the Victorian College of the Arts, and studied at the National Art School in Sydney and at the Sydney College of the Arts, where he completed a PhD in Visual Arts.