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Indepth Arts News:
"Malerie Marder"
2000-10-05 until 2000-11-26
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
Young American artist, Malerie Marder, creates vivid colour
photographs which are highly studied in both their emotional
and aesthetic effects. Her work relates to the time-honoured
photographic genre of the nude study, made contemporary
through a disquieting psychological charge. This charge
derives in part from the photographer's close, often familial,
relationship with her sitters. Marder photographs her mother,
her father, her sister, her former boyfriends, and herself,
naked. Even when the study is of a solitary figure, there is a
sense that Marder is always there, whether behind or in front of
the camera, as the missing link in an emotional dyad or triad.
She is the one who connects her subjects together, and she is
the one who choreographs and manipulates their poses. She
constructs scenarios which hint obliquely at the erotic
undercurrents which normally remain submerged in the
archetypal family drama. The father undressed and exposed,
as vulnerable as a baby before his daughter's eye; the mother
caught in a Mrs Robinson-like, bathroom encounter with her
daughter's young boyfriend; the photographer and her sister,
long-limbed and slick-skinned, competing sirens set aglow in
the bright light of a Californian afternoon.
Marder is always looking, she says, for a failed sense of
connection that I find romantic. The locations she chooses for
her pictures - one hour 'sex' motels and the interiors of affluent
suburban homes - contribute to their strangely detached
mood. There is a sense of ennui and unreality which is pure
soft-core, while their dark, troubling glamour relates more to
the tradition of film noir. Living in the same city as Hollywood, it
is unsurprising that Marder has learnt as much from the
language of film-making, as photography or painting. She
condenses the taciturn emotion, the sexual frisson and the
elliptical narrative of auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, or Mike
Nichols (The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge) into the still
photograph. Contemporary 'staged' photography is often
related to the artificially-concentrated, dramatically-arrested
moment of a film still, and while Marder's photographs could
well have emanated from a mental movie screening deep in her
own unconscious, her pictures are subtly different to the
post-Cindy Sherman school. The 'before' and 'after' of the
moment in a Marder photograph is, instead, concentrated into
the extended 'now' of the single, still frame. Malerie Marder has
created an original blend of documentary, directed and diaristic
photography, which is imbued with a very particular vision of
love.
Kate Bush
Senior Programmer
IMAGE:
© Malerie Marder
Victor Marder, 2000
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