Mark Mushet

Born in North Vancouver in 1963, Mark Mushet has created images in one form or another since 1985. He first worked in film and video, producing arts documentaries and shorts for television. In the late '80s he began to take a serious interest in still photography. His first projects in this field merged macro images with New Music for a series of live slide-projection performances. By 1995, Mushet had established a career in editorial, design and fine-art photography. He has contributed award-winning portraits of cultural, entertainment, business and sports personalities to a variety of Canadian magazines. He is currently the visual-arts photographer for The Georgia Straight and produces images for contemporary-music packaging. Mushet's fine-art photography is inspired by abstract impressionism, in particular, the work of German painter Gerhard Richter. "I'm interested in the way Richter's painting is highly seductive, multi-layered, and seems to hover between the mediums of painting and photography. Even his figurative work has this sense about it."