- Mark Hogancamp
- A detail from Mark Hogancamp’s “Untitled (Brits on MC’s, in snow, Jan. 17, 2010)”, 2010, 11” x 14.5”, archival digital C-print
More than a decade ago, Kingston resident Mark Hogancamp was brutally beaten outside a dive bar. Left with a traumatic brain injury, Hogancamp retreated into an imaginary world of his own creation: Marwencol.
Marwencol is a 1/6 scale, WWII-era Belgian village in which he stages and photographs a complex narrative of Nazi intrigue, lesbian melodrama, and Sgt. Rock-style heroics. With his cast of dolls, Hogancamp freely combines fantasy and history, staging a confrontation between Kurt Russell and Goebbels, time-traveling witches who antagonize Hitler, and various scenes that act out his anxieties and desires.
Hogancamp’s photo documentation of his Belgian village is the work that is Marwencol. The subject of Jeff Malmberg’s award-winning 2010 documentary of the same name, the Marwencol photos consist of thousands of meticulously directed images that Hogancamp once created in obscurity, and now still with a soupcon of recognition.
“Crash Landing!” new and old work by Mark Hogancamp opens at One Mile Gallery in Kingston on Saturday, December 1, 2-7pm. Through January 5.
This article appears in November 2012.
