Putting the "art" in apartment
Buzz 312 for Mark Prier's home movies
BY Sean Flinn
Illustration by Gareth Lichty
Mark Prier in apartment 312 is a good host.
Two years ago, the 26-year-old began welcoming visitors into his apartment to watch video art. “When it came right down to it, I really couldn’t afford to rent a commercial space, but our apartment was larger than we needed,” he explains.
It may strike many as counterintuitive, but Prier waited until he moved from Toronto to Corner Brook (population: a little over 42,000, including surrounding areas), on the west side of Newfoundland, to open his gallery.
The idea starts to make sense when you talk to Prier, a full-time artist, curator and electronic musician. He graduated from the visual studies program at the University of Toronto, but grew up in rural Ontario. Prier explores themes of wilderness, mapping and survival—ideas fed by the proximity of Gros Morne National Park and other natural areas.
His reach is limited, but Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, part of Memorial University of Newfoundland, is close by. Its fine arts program gives Prier a built-in, albeit small, local audience. “Once the art students go away for the summer, things slow down. It’s a small art community here in Corner Brook, and video art certainly isn’t the dominant medium in this province.”
While that may be true, Prier still gets enough submissions to program one to three artists in the apartment for a threemonth period and one artist a month to show on his online gallery at www.312.com.
