Whimsical pastiches of nature and technology abound in Mark Licari's works on paper. Fantastic hybrids composed of plant life, vegetable produce, kitchen equipment and computer hardware appear to march and sometimes soar across crisp, white paper battlefields. Licari likens his ink and pen drawings — some of which measure well over 50 feet — to kudzu, a ruthlessly persistent type of vine that can grow as much as fourteen inches a day, sometimes swallowing up entire houses in just a few months. Licari's drawings develop in a somewhat similar fashion. In some cases, a large-scale image will be executed across many sheets of paper which are combined to form a single mural. At other times, Licari displays a number of drawings salon-style, creating a kind of ad-hoc garden landscape. He notes that "the organic aspects of the drawings such as plant life, food, and mysterious goo, are ever-growing, ever-consuming, and fit to adapt to whatever technology or common object that they might encounter." Like kudzu, Licari's drawings grow at a startling rate, off the paper, onto walls, even spilling out of the gallery into public space or the virtual corridors of the computer. He received an MFA from the University of Southern California and a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder.