Howard Yezerski Gallery : Denise Marika

Denise Marika

Effaced 1

Video/Photo Installation

January 7 - February 8, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, January 7, 2011 6 - 8pm

“My work operates through a tight personal focus on detail, gesture and circumstance and looks at how we respond to violence, conflict and loss, Effaced 1, positions the viewer as an intimate witness and participant to these events exploring how memory and cultural history are shaped by our actions and experiences.”

Effaced 1 2010
1: to wipe out; do away with; expunge
2: to rub out, erase, or obliterate (outlines, traces, inscriptions)
Single channel Video; duration = 00:19:41

Through actions familiar and volatile Marika’s art confronts our passivity as voyeurs and awakens our responsibility as witnesses and participants. It is difficult to fully comprehend the cumulative impact of voices silenced each day due to urban, domestic, and political violence. The struggle for human rights and threat to freedom of speech continue to be at the center of conflicts around the world. Effaced 1 gathers first person narratives and abstract projected imagery to position the viewer as an engaged witness to this struggle.

Initial research for Effaced involved gathering voices from news stories and led Marika to shift out of a studio based practice in order to interview witnesses and survivors and to live in their communities. The fully developed video project hopes to give voice to issues surrounding migration, development and the humanitarian aid crisis in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Effaced 1 uses video, sound, and photo installation to shape a landscape in which concrete actions, sociopolitical issues and abstract elements are exchanged and layered. The performed gestures in the current video installation explore the act and metaphor of erasure, searching and drowning as it relates to body, voice and text. The editing is primarily sound driven and consequently the sequencing of images is shaped by the dynamics of rhythm and pitch. The performed gestures and stills are contrasted by the abstract and fluid overlay of audio, visuals, and text.

Conversations 2010
Denise Marika, video and John Holland, music
duration = 7:24

In Conversations, her new collaboration with composer John Holland, Marika places herself in the flow of events. The fully developed video project hopes to give voice to issues surrounding migration, development and the humanitarian aid crisis in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The video predominantly shot in Cambodia reflects upon the labor, fragility, humor and pain of the human condition and it’s history.

The last sequence is from a documentary shot of the Khmer Rouge forced labor camps during the Pol Pot regime 1975-1979. The combined effects of forced labor, malnutrition, lack of medical care and countless executions resulted in the deaths of 1.7 to 2.5 million people, 21 percent of the population of Cambodia. Three generations later the country and its people are still grappling the personal and political aftermath of this massive loss. The strength, humor and hope of the Cambodian people, is evident in their faith, activism and unrelenting drive for human rights.

Each track in Conversations is separated into short musical/video segments, naturally bounded by silences and darkness. The segments are recombined independently of one another, and separated by varied durations of silence and darkness. This musical composition is an electronic choral work, founded on the tradition of the unaccompanied motet. It consists of recorded segments from throat-singers of Asia and Canada, throat patients 'speaking' through implanted electronic larynx devices, digital and processed human voices, and voices of animals.

ARTIST BIO
Video installation artist, Denise Marika, has an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and is represented by the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. She has exhibited across the US and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MASS MoCA, Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media, Worcester Art Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a retrospective at the Pomona College Museum of Art. Works in permanent collections include the Rose Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. She has received grants from the NEA and LEF Foundation among others, and is an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art Studio for Interrelated Media. Marika is currently on leave and has a Fullbright to work and travel in Southeast Asia based in Cambodia and Nepal.

John Holland Bio
John Holland is a composer, performer, author and digital recording artist. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. His work emphasizes the integration of science and art, incorporating structures and ideas that reference a variety of natural phenomena. He has produced a number of recordings of electronic and digital music, and has published scores for most solo instruments (with and without electronics), piano music, chamber music, orchestra, concertos, opera. John Schaefer, host of New Sounds on WNYC Radio in New York cited Holland's Natural Phenomena as "one of the notable CD's of 2005." Most recently Holland’s music has been performed at the Yamaha Piano Salon (NYC), in Jordan Hall (New England Conservatory), Pickman Hall (Longy School of Music), Bartos Theatre (Media Lab, MIT), University Gallery (Tufts University), Harvard University, IBM (Yorktown).
More John Holland at www.johnholland.ws and www.artscience.org

For further information please contact Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm