Denise Marika: Effaced 1

Opening this Friday, January 7 - February 8, 2011


Denise Marika: Effaced 1

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

Effaced 1  is the first in a four part series which hopes to give voice to issues surrounding migration, development and the humanitarian aid crisis in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. 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.  In Conversations, her new collaboration with composer John Holland, Marika places herself in the flow of events. The video predominantly shot in Cambodia reflects upon the labor,fragility, humor and pain of the human condition and it's history. 

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.

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.

“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.”

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Conversations  2010

Denise Marika, video and John Holland, music

duration = 7:24

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. 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. 

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.