That's Mark Jenkins All Over

Biking after work, Jenkins is less artist, more location scout. "The city becomes a puzzle," he says. "My mind's always moving like a Rubik's cube." Passing a "Do Not Enter" sign, he wonders, "What if I split my sculpture in half and had half entering the sign and half passing through it." At the Lincoln Memorial, he thinks: "I'd like to cast Lincoln's head in tape and keep it in my apartment. But there are the Park Police."

At the Reflecting Pool, he recalls when he floated "water spiders" to skim the surface. Parking meters "cash my brain," Jenkins says. "I was thinking the ears for a big bunny. Or shoes, a guy lying on his back with his feet up somehow."

And when he saw the ubiquitous fiberglass pandas, he thought of making one that was "too racy -- like one the city wouldn't allow." In March, he unveiled a prostitute panda-- bear head tacked to the cast of a svelte mannequin pimped out in platform heels.

"It was still chilly and so someone put like a wool scarf around her neck that had little panda bears around it," says Victoria Reis, executive director of Transformer Gallery, which requested that Jenkins install it on its street.

Another gallery contacted him for a commission. So Jenkins purchased $1,000 worth of tape and cast an entire Honda Civic. He wrapped it in plastic, taped over that layer by layer, cut that surface off of the car and reinforced the final, transparent automobile with glass rods. Looking at the glassy husk, one might have thought that the Civic had cast off a clear shell, like a snake that molts its skin. "I was looking for the threshold," Jenkins says. The car wouldn't fit into the gallery.

So much the better. To Jenkins, galleries are "aquariums," because "all art could swim out on the street, or because art's treated like little exotic fish that can't survive outside."

Turning away from a lively 3D street art community in New York, Jenkins chooses to remain a black sheep in Washington because his work wouldn't make as much sense anywhere else. He is an environmental artist, and this is his environment -- like a mash-up between typical graffiti scrawler and the urban evolution of "environmental artist" Andy Goldsworthy (whom Jenkins speaks of admirably and often).

Although Jenkins's pieces often feel silly -- parking meters as lollipops? -- they are meant to satirize objects designed by the government to restrain us. "Those lollies were outside the Department of Energy," Jenkins says. "So there was kind of a joke like: 'Where do we get our energy from? Sugar?' "

Says Jenkins: "D.C. is perfect because it's the control center."