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Indepth Arts News:
"Video Art of Bostonian Denise
Marika"
1999-11-19 until 0000-00-00
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA,
USA United States of America
A work by Boston-based artist Denise Marika will open at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, Mass. The piece is entitled Turn Away and will be installed in the Devereux Gallery next to the three works by Bruce Nauman currently on exhibit.
Marika's work combines video and sculpture by confining or embedding a
moving image in a physical structure. Working with her own body, the
artist records activities or personal rituals exploring issues of power,
control and vulnerability. Her video art concentrates on a nude figure
or figures repeatedly performing a task. The physical forms into which
the images are embedded or projected structure these actions. The
conceptual coherence of this approach - sculptures determining filmed
actions - owes much to the legacy of Bruce Nauman (whose 1970 Green
Light Corridor, through which visitors must walk, and 1971 Yellow
Triangle Room are currently on exhibit at MASS MoCA and will share a
gallery with Marika's video.)
Richard Kalina wrote of the work:
The piece [Turn Away, 1991] is a complex and evocative
one, and comparisons can be drawn with Nauman's work. Although dealing
with similar ideas about ritualized confinement and repression, Marika
shows little of Nauman's unpredictability and barely contained hysteria.
Her work is quieter, more elegant, yet undiminished in its affective
power. She has managed to go beyond the literary, the overtly
psychological, to create something perhaps more difficult - a sculptural
amalgam which loses nothing of its emotional immediacy. -- Art in
America, Feb. 1991
Two sculptural elements make up Turn Away: a large (8' x 8' x 20')
plywood box with a long copper drawer at the far end that contains three
video monitors facing the viewer. Museum visitors are drawn into the
plywood box by the monitors showing a nude figure lying in the drawer as
if in a coffin. She lies on her side facing the visitors, opens her
eyes slightly, then very quickly turns away, repeating this action again
and again. Triply confined (within both the plywood box, the copper
drawer, and the video space of the TV monitors) the female figure
confines herself even further by turning away from the viewer.
Denise Marika began her career as a sculptor at Pomona College in
California, and incorporated video in her work while in graduate school
at UCLA. In 1987 she moved to Massachusetts where she has received
awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts
Council on the Arts and Humanities, the New England Foundation for the
Arts, a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College and most recently a
Visible Republic Grant for a public art project in Roxbury, to be
completed in the fall of 2000.
In 1994 Marika had a solo exhibition accompanied by a catalogue at the
a href=http://www.boston.com/gardner/>Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 1996, her video installation, More
Weight, was shown at the < ahref=http://www.moma.org>Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Boston,
her work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Fogg
Art Museum, the Davis Museum, and as part of the collections of the Rose
Art Museum. In 1999, her work has been exhibited in the CyberArts
Festival in Boston, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in
Connecticut and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington and is currently
on display at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.
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