Born in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, 1949, lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Over the last ten years, Mark Gomes’ sculptures have consistently posed questions about mechanisms of display and the relationship between the fabrication of objects and the variable meanings assigned to them by museums. Mining the field of natural history and archeology, Gomes explores the shifting matrix of human interpretation within a geological timeline. In works such as Bones (1996)—a collection of twenty-seven skeletal shapes suggestive of anatomical and architectural archetypes—the viewer can formulate private classification systems based on empirical analysis.

Untitled (Moving and Storage) of 1999 features a ping pong table buried beneath graduated layers of cardboard that form a mountainous topographical model incised into a grid. Each section fits neatly into a corresponding cardboard box, exposing the internal construction of the sculpture while making a subtle reference to the compartmentalization of lives. A staple of suburban basements, the recreational table speaks to a particular twentieth century lifestyle that, even now, could be termed vintage. Not unlike a replica of a latent archeological site, the sculpture alludes to a past and a future in which the excavation and interpretation of objects is uncertain.