Mark Clarson is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon.  He was born in Dallas, Texas in 1973.  Mark Clarson received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the University of Chicago.

His work has been exhibited at the Body Builder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago (Tony Wight Gallery), Tacoma Contemporary, Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, the Brenda Taylor Gallery in New York, and numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the country. 

His long term interest in natural history and his fascination with sixteenth and seventeenth century curiosity cabinets (or Wunderkammers), combined with his preoccupation with Freudian psychoanalysis, led him to create an ongoing series of sculpture based on curiosities and pseudo-scientific specimens.  Many of his pieces mimic visual cues that were often embodied in objects from early scientific collecting.  Rooted in geology, taxidermy, ethnography, anthropology, and archaeology; his pieces employ a direct symbolic connection to those from the natural history lexicon. 

His pieces are often displayed in small groups that are systematically curated to form a larger constructed mock collection.  In this way, the pieces inherently inform each other through the contextual relationships that are presented.