Transcendent Slaughter: Die With The Most Likes' Poison Candy

Mark Wilson always knew he had to make things. Until a year ago, he didn't know anyone would want them. "The assumption was that I would grow up to die alone doing something that I hated," he says.

His childhood monsters came out of his sleep. He believed in ghosts and still does. He's sure he saw one, an elderly man floating in his closet, and still pictures the face's exact dimensions. Eventually the monsters loosened up, "fucking around and doing goofy ass shit, just like I would."

He wrote, too: prose and poems before he knew those words. "It was just the tool that I needed."

He's from northwestern Indiana, "the bleeding heart of the Rust Belt," and loves it without irony. "I grew up very much so baptized in strip mall culture," he says, "and just aimlessly going to varying fast casual restaurants."

The days were Huffy bikes to gas stations, water from hoses, and one-on-one football, sprinting at a friend to see what happened. When the outdoors ran out, it was boredom he's come to treasure. A mall bench on a ninety-degree day, staring at the sun. "A lot of my views on life and philosophies on existence as a whole were oddly developed in those moments of severe boredom in a cultureless wasteland."

He won homecoming king as a freshman, a beloved stoner who played Yu Gi Oh and did stand-up in class. He retreated into Palahniuk and Murakami, a world he preferred.

The people there have "fuck everything, all the time," attitude and that's carried into his art exactly. "There's no filter. There's nothing to hold back. It's just the total and utter evacuation of everything that you're feeling at one time."

His high school sat across from a dog food factory. No air conditioning; open windows all summer. "You would really be sitting there and inhaling this absolutely transcendent slaughter," he says. It disgusted him. Now it's foundational: "beast being slaughtered to feed other beast" in his nostrils while he learned things he'd never remember. "Was I ever really there, and was my presence in any way different from what was happening across the street in that slaughter?"

The other institution was the Church. Irish Catholic, he learned that everything he did was inadequate. In second grade a teacher told him every sin drove another nail into Jesus, blood running down the hands. He went home crying.

By eighth grade he knew it was bullshit. By high school he was working against it. The school spent days preparing for a bishop's visit. Someone baked an enormous sheet cake bearing his face. Mark left mass fifteen minutes early, found the cake alone, ran his fingers through it, ate a chunk, and finished the job in the bathroom. Hours later the principal offered rewards over the PA. Mark's teeth were still brown.

"Even at the time I'm just like, dude, nothing is sacred. That sheet cake was the horrific representation of the frustration that I was feeling in terms of the fakeness and the thin veneer that we were all applying to ourselves."

He graduated into the recession in 2010 and moved to Chicago for the first job available: building virtual booths for mandatory corporate seminars.

"It was me who hated my job creating a digital place for others who hated their job to spend time at in a mandatory fashion," he says. "This circular trough of inconsequence." His summary: "my first foray into creating digital waste for a modest living."

Then thirteen years programming spam emails, "an insect in this massive glass corporate terrarium." He was two people, Die and Mark, "this entire part of me cloaked for eight hours a day."

He'd been painting and writing seriously since 2011: two novels of two hundred thousand words apiece, each selling four or five copies. "It was a long haul of creating for no one in particular, in just this weird, strange vacuum that I existed in by myself."

"I think that what I'm making is really good, and I've put everything that I had into it. And so it's a little odd to think that no one finds it relatable, no one finds it humorous, no one finds it anything at all." Looking back, he's kinder. "People get busy. It takes a lot for somebody to engage with a piece of art for even a minute."

What was nobody responding to? "This generalized exhaustion that we were all feeling, this feeling that something is constantly being taken from us but we don't really know what that is. Little pieces of us dying all day every day, and these tiny little sacrifices we make to an altar that's leased by someone else."

His image is livestock. Animal-human hybrids fed flavorless pellets, "and we were just more than happy to chew on those forever. Just chew and shit, and that's it." Told this sounds like the dog food factory, he agrees. "The indifference to it all is insane. The spectators at the slaughterhouse, the things being slaughtered themselves, the drains filled with blood that goes nowhere in particular, or into the river that people then drink from. It's this whole horrific circle of slop."

The humor is survival. "If you don't laugh at it, it's a very easy place to just become despondent. You have to find humor in these things, otherwise it's enough to drive you completely insane." A glory hole in a Chili's. A meal at Golden Corral consumed via suppository.

At his first public show, in Milan, an Italian man gave him the phrase. Poison candy. The colors are fish bait, and once you're close, "it starts to dismantle your psyche." His own words: "relentless, teeth grating, jaw snapping, retina collapsing."

The writing often runs the opposite direction, sad beneath silly. He calls himself a documentarian, and reality keeps catching up. A man defecated in a Bass Pro Shop fountain, four years after Mark made that piece.

The mission: "wanting to construct a county fair in which everyone can ride the Gravitron and we can all puke into the same commemorative bucket."

He can watch an old man on a plane choke down stale peanuts and write ten thousand words on the man's life. The strangest ideas come at the edge of sleep. He types into a to-do app, waking to five or ten entries he doesn't remember. Bingo night at a data center. Sweating and vaping outside Penn Station. Diving into a meat pool. "What did I mean by this?" They're often the most surreal work.

Lately prose and drawing happen together. "The pen and the cursor oftentimes dictate each other's motion." Writing is where he goes quiet. "It's like a blackout moment for me, honestly. It's the most peace that I can find in anything."

At home during COVID, his job took five or six hours a week. The company believed it took forty or fifty. He did that for five years, until he quit last year. "It felt really good to be a shank in the side of this company and just kind of bleed them out while I was doing something that I actually loved."

Things changed one morning in 2021. He'd made a ground beef tezzard in a window, an inside joke. Artnome wanted it; Mark asked him to donate to an emerging artist fund instead. Artnome did, then bought two one-of-ones on hic-et-nunc and tweeted. Within hours everything Mark had listed was selling.

"I cried. I definitely cried that morning. It felt as though I was on the Gravitron, neck snapped back, just spinning around, just joyfully puking into the air."

After every drop he writes every collector a personal note. Thirty seconds of a stranger's attention still feels foreign after that much solitude. "Even just a single question about a piece means more than anyone will ever know."

When a friend died last year, he raised seventy thousand dollars for a local hospice serving people with nowhere to die in peace. It's his answer to the terrarium years. "If you change somebody's day just for twenty seconds, I think that's a pretty powerful thing."

First, “crank one’s hog” (his words – 24 hours of art does not necessarily endorse cranking hog).

Second, sitting in a bath until all the water evaporates.

Third, cooking 60/40 ground beef like a steak. His mother did it. "You'd be chipping teeth on gristle nuggets, dude." I told him he'd lost his mind. He'd sworn off ground beef two weeks earlier over contamination fears, which changes nothing.