Founding Partner
Current1986 to 1992. The real start date is nearly 10 years earlier. Apollo Marconi unofficially began in 1987 as a sole proprietorship called "Mark Block Cabinets". The year prior, to supplement modest earnings in the music video and documentary business, I had accepted a very kind offer from Winnipeg fine furniture designer/builder Gord MacKenzie to show me the ropes building kitchen cabinets. Between 1986 and 1990 I directed the documentary "Prairie Soul: Black Rhythms from the Heartland" for producer and musician Adrian Peek with federal and provincial money. At the same time, after breaking out on my own and buying some tools, I built 3 custom kitchens around Winnipeg with the help of freelancer and front-man for "The Cheer", Lloyd Peterson. When the kitchen reno economy suffered a hiccup in the late 80s (mostly due to the era's soaring mortgage rates) I branched out into tables and other freestanding pieces. If folks weren't investing in home improvement, perhaps I could keep going by making pieces they could take with them.By 1991 I had started experimenting with new materials. At the J Werier salvage warehouse on Princess I would comb the multiple floors of hardware, furniture parts, store fixtures and more for hours at a time, making up for my lack of an engineering education by studying how things connect to other things. My uncle John Henry calls anything that does that a "gahzinta" (literally "goes-into"). I was also haunting the architecture library at the U of M to take out design and engineering books, and using their photocopier to snag select pages out of Domus and Interni magazines from Italy, just to see what was going on out there (pre-high-speed-internet) in the world of design.By 1992 after hearing the buzz around this amazing Winnipeg metalworker building furniture only the Italians were attempting, I sought out Fred Troost, someone who I came to feel was surely Winnipeg's king of the "gahzintas".
