This morning, Dr. Morton Reingold, from the office of the Chief Coroner of the City of Toronto rang us up on our Pink House Studios phone.  Assuming that he was calling about a death-mask or some other forensic assistance, I immediately interrupted Mark from another call to speak with him.

Moments later, I was summoned back to the phone to help identify a piece of sculpture Dr. Reingold seemed concerned about.  It was then I learned that our friend, and Mark’s principle Toronto collector, Billy Jamieson, had passed away. Dr. Reingold wouldn’t answer our questions about the circumstances of Billy’s death but was anxious to learn something about one of Mark’s sculptures he had come across in Billy’s condo.

Now, it has to be explained that Bill Jamieson was no ordinary collector, specializing as he did in Egyptian mummies, antique shrunken heads and all sort of bizarre ethnographic art and artifacts.  His condo is literally filled with human skulls, bones and macabre ecoutrements.  With a long history of supplying the bizarre tastes of rock stars and celebrities,  his company, Jamieson Tribal Art, had recently been working on a television series for the History Channel featuring items from his collection and his adventures as a collector.  Let’s just say that he has definitely led the life-less-ordinary and leave it at that.

He has also been collecting Mark’s artwork for a number of years now, having first encountered it when he visited the Isaacs Gallery as a Toronto high school student back in 1972.  Consequently, he has some of Mark’s best known pieces like “The Incurable Romantic,”  “Armistice,” and “Thawing Out;” some of which figured in high profile censorship cases in the 1970’s.

The Coroner told us he had come across something in Billy’s house that seemed to be a male sprawled upright inside a white box with the door open.  The back of the box was signed “Mark Prent,” so he Googled that name and found the same image with contact information for Pink House Studios.  When I learned that this had something to do with Billy, I quickly recognized that Dr. Reingold was referring to “Thawing Out.”

He soberly said that he needed to know if it was a real person in that white box!  We told him it was just a sculpture made of polyester resin and fiberglass, way back in 1972.  

After a moment or two of silence, he soberly commented to Mark, “You know you are very good!”

We await further information, but are confident that Billy would have approved.