That's Mark Jenkins All Over

In Rio, Jenkins was the teacher, and so he went on to wrap everything in the apartment -- every pot, pan, even the toilet. His apartment started to reek of the oniony, plastic whiff of the backside of a piece of cheap tape. Was that dangerous? Better call 3M.

"They were like, 'Yeah, it's fine,' and I was like, 'What if there are six or seven hundred rolls degassing in a small flat?' And they were like, 'Maybe you should get a cartridge respirator.' "

He did, and set about casting the only thing left. Starting at the feet, Jenkins mummified himself in tape (the lower back was particularly difficult) before realizing that his circulation was being cut off. That loss of feeling plus a pair of sleek new scissors became a recipe for disaster: blood all over the apartment, a pair of cut-up legs in the middle of the carpet.

Eventually, he perfected the craft.

"I'm not OCD but I have those tendencies," he says. A clip he posted to the video Web site YouTube.com shows how he casts his own head, with a warning at the outset cautioning viewers not to imitate for fear of suffocation.

Jenkins took his first perfect reproduction and threw it into a Rio dumpster. A dewy angel of glistening tape, it drew mixed attention -- some viewers were repulsed, but one man even held his son up to peer into the garbage. If Jenkins wasn't already hooked, he was now. By throwing away what was an exact copy of himself, he experienced what he can best describe as an actual out-of-body experience. "I saw the garbage truck come by and dispose of it. It's destruction of the self."

It's also a form of self-examination. Jenkins realized he could literally project himself into positions and places he otherwise would never linger. Returning to Washington in 2004, he positioned tape men as beggars on the sidewalk, stood one upside-down in a handstand on 14th Street, and cloned a fleet to wave at passing traffic from the snow banks blanketing Braddock Road.

In March, he achieved a breakthrough at Meridian Park's statue of female "Serenity" -- one Jenkins figure knelt at her feet while the other pleaded upward for some sort of acknowledgment. The tape men seemed to somehow bring the stone to life and the passersby who stopped to examine the new sculptures found themselves reexamining the white Carrara marble of "Serenity" as well, just as the tape men did. "People who look into the install become part of the install, too," Jenkins says. "It's kind of surreal. . . . It takes over everything."

As good art often does, Jenkins's work makes the ordinary appear strange.

He seeks not to confuse with a cryptic tag or impress with a traditional monument, but to engage. Whereas art in a museum is framed as art, Jenkins appreciates that passersby have to make decisions about what they find on the street. Viewers often will ask him what the tape pieces are, and whether they are "art." "I just want them to ask that question," he says.

In that way, Jenkins's work breaks from most street art on the Wooster site -- from graffiti to wheat-paste posters to those infamous "Obey" stickers featuring the noggin of Andre the Giant -- in that it does not deface the city but is innocent and literally transparent. For that, Schiller says, "Mark is redefining uncommissioned illegal art."

Jenkins saw online interest peak with his most approachable project, labeled "storker." From a doll purchased in Brazil, he fathered more than 60 tape babies that seemed to pull down signs, wheel abandoned shopping carts, crawl up the feet of a begrudging commander on his oxidized iron horse. By choosing to cast a baby doll, Jenkins was toying with an impulse to protect a child from the harsh city environment.