THE FIND ART FOUNDATION

At the age of four, founder of The Find Art Foundation, Mark L. Christensen’s mother showed him how beautiful art could be crafted from found objects, starting his lifelong journey as a maker. Through up-cycling, Mark has created movie props, automobile components, living spaces, and even some of the first snowboard designs. His newest project, the Futura Space House, unites everything he loves —classic science fiction, space-age architecture, and innovative art that aims to inspire all who visit. Mark aims to inspire the growth of human consciousness for future generations through “found” art, which is what drove Mark to launch The Find Art Foundation in 2023.

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Mark L. Christensen is an American filmmaker, cinematographer, musician, author, entertainer, and pioneering competitive skateboarder and snowboarder whose career has crossed performance, athletics, music, filmmaking, and science writing.

Christensen was born on September 4, 1959, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of four children of Larry and Sherry Christensen. His father was an executive with Volkswagen of America. When Christensen was approximately one year old, the family moved to California's San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up in San Jose and Fremont.

Christensen first became an entertainer through dance. As disco emerged during the 1970s, he and his sister developed a dance act inspired partly by what they were seeing on television. They performed at restaurants, public events, and other venues, eventually winning a dance competition at the Salt Lake City County Fair in 1975. After moving to Colorado, Christensen continued performing with the traveling Colorado Crazy road show. The experience established something that would recur throughout his life: an attraction to performing, creating, and communicating with an audience.

Skateboarding had entered his life even earlier. Growing up in Fremont, Christensen initially used a skateboard simply as transportation to school. He remembers padlocking his board to the school fence alongside the bicycles at junior high and skating his first empty swimming pool around 1970.

As improvements in wheels and equipment transformed skateboarding during the 1970s, Christensen grew with the developing sport. He became a sponsored professional competitor in Powell Peralta's Denver division. At the 1979 Oceanside Freestyle Nationals, Christensen won the Sponsored Men Over 18 division. His name appears in the November 1979 issue of Skateboarder magazine (Vol. 6, No. 4), which also contains photographs of Christensen from the event, including one in which he is wearing a Bones shirt.

Christensen's involvement with board sports continued into the formative years of snowboarding. He competed in the sport when snowboarders were still experimenting with equipment, techniques, and even ways to gain access to mountains where snowboards were prohibited. He competed against such early figures as Tom Sims and became friends with Sims during this period.

At the 1982 King of the Mountain competition at Berthoud Pass, Colorado, Christensen competed against Sims and other early snowboarders and defeated Sims. Christensen recalls overhearing Sims afterward on a pay phone inside the ski lodge saying, "I'll get him next year." Sims did. The two continued to compete against one another as the sport developed.

Christensen also experimented with snowboard design, developing what he called the Isometric Snowboard. Although little contemporary documentation of the design survives, the board itself has been preserved in a snowboard museum collection in Vail, Colorado. Christensen's participation in the formative period of snowboarding has also been documented in later historical material concerning the sport.

Alongside athletics and performance, Christensen pursued architecture and design. He attended Arapahoe Community College before transferring to the University of Denver. After four years of college-level study, he chose not to enter the conventional professional ladder of architecture. He had begun playing guitar in 1968 and increasingly believed that he had stories and ideas about life that he wanted to communicate.

In 1983, Christensen formed the band The Guild. He subsequently attended Musicians Institute in Los Angeles in 1986. In 1994 he relocated to Austin, Texas, hoping to rebuild The Guild around musicians who shared his commitment to the project. The experience eventually led him to conclude that filmmaking might provide a more direct way of telling his stories without depending upon an entire band to realize them.

Christensen moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and began teaching himself filmmaking. Without conventional film-school training, he learned much of the practical craft by calling cinematographers, camera stores, laboratories, and other film professionals and asking questions about how motion pictures were actually made.

That year he began shooting his first feature, Box Head Revolution, on black-and-white 16mm film. Christensen was determined not to let a conventional job dictate the production schedule, so he supported himself by restoring vintage sports cars between weekend shoots. Production ranged from the desert around the Salton Sea to his own backyard near Highland and Sunset Boulevards in Hollywood.

An unexpected connection eventually brought the film to New York. Christensen had located a used automobile for New York filmmaker Matthew Harrison, who subsequently saw Box Head Revolution and became an enthusiastic supporter of the picture. Harrison helped introduce the film to New York's Pioneer Theater and to festival opportunities in Europe.

Box Head Revolution received its New York theatrical premiere in August 2002. Despite its extremely modest origins, the film attracted substantial critical attention. Reviews and coverage appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, New York Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and TV Guide. The film established Christensen as an independent filmmaker with a distinctly personal approach to cinema.

Christensen subsequently moved to nearly the opposite end of the production spectrum with his next feature. Production on what was originally titled North by El Norte began in 2006 with a substantially larger independent budget and professional production infrastructure.

Alice Brooks served as principal cinematographer and brought Panavision into the production, giving the film the polished anamorphic 35mm appearance Christensen wanted. Christensen had separately acquired Russian 35mm motion-picture cameras and photographed approximately twenty percent of the picture himself using Panavision lenses.

The screenplay attracted an increasingly experienced cast and crew, including Danny Trejo. Christensen later recalled that he did not know exactly what to expect when Trejo became involved and instead worked with what the actor brought to the production. The collaboration ultimately became central to the picture.

During preparation for commercial release, Christensen trusted the distributor's experience and accepted several marketing and editorial recommendations, including changing the film's title from North by El Norte to American Flyer. Distributor Trevor Drinkwater had previously spent approximately twenty years working with Walmart before becoming involved in film distribution, providing a connection that helped lead to the film's DVD release.

After American Flyer completed its principal commercial release, Christensen returned to the film. Trejo came back to shoot additional scenes, allowing Christensen to restore material and story elements closer to the screenplay he had originally written. Christensen recut the picture and restored its original title, North by El Norte, creating his director's cut rather than merely renaming the previously released version.

Christensen's later work as an author also originated in filmmaking. While developing a futuristic screenplay titled Smoothies, he began researching science in an attempt to construct a plausible future for the story. During that research, he believed he had discovered relationships among biological evolution, consciousness, environmental change, and technological development that deserved investigation beyond the screenplay.

What began as research for fiction expanded into approximately eight years of independent investigation and ultimately became Fungus Theory of Conscious Growth, published in 2023. The book presents Christensen's framework for examining biological evolution, consciousness, adaptation, accumulated knowledge, and humanity's technological future.

After decades centered largely on filmmaking and writing, Christensen returned to one of his earliest creative pursuits. He re-entered the recording studio to record Guild songs written primarily during the late 1980s that he had never had the opportunity to properly record.

At the same time, Christensen continued developing motion-picture projects, including Son of an Auschwitz Guard, a dramatic film in pre-production.

Although Christensen's pursuits have ranged from competitive skateboarding and the beginnings of snowboarding to architecture, music, motion-picture production, cinematography, and science writing, a common pattern runs through them: an attraction to subjects still being explored and a willingness to learn by making things himself. What can appear from the outside to be several different careers has, for Christensen, been a continuing process of exploration, self-education, and creative development.