#maria marshall

[sexypinkon]

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[rrrauschen]

Maria Marshall, {2009} I Saw You Crying

[simichiamano]

Maria Marshall Playground, 2001

[illuminations-of-nyx]

MARIA MARSHALL

PLAYGROUND 2001

PLAYROOM 2015   https://vimeo.com/146631913

http://www.mariamarshall.com

Playground and Playroom are thematically linked investigations of presence and absence in the context of religious authority.  In the earlier work, we see and hear a boy apparently kicking a ball against the wall of a church – and yet the ball remains invisible, leaving us to question the effectiveness of this anti-establishment act.  Marshall’s new film was commissioned by the Russian Government in association with Manifesta 2014, and this is its world premiere. A ball ricochets round inside a run-down Georgian church, but this time we don’t see its implied bouncer and kicker. We hear Ave Maria and Cantate Domino as well as the ball, on a sound track which suggests, says Marshall, that ‘even the music created to celebrate God is in this instant engineered to be competitive’.  Is there, then, a godly agency behind the ball’s movements as it makes merry, knocking over chairs yet not the table of devotional images? Both films might be read as attacks on religious hypocrisy which also draw baleful attention to football as the closest many people now get to religious experience.

[sineadw]

Maria Marshall at the Mac's, Grand Hornu, Belgium. This one is difficult for me- the galleries and the scale of the work were equally breathtaking, and I think if I wasn't a parent, or maybe if I wasn't a bereaved parent, the work wouldn't have annoyed the hell out of me so much. Marshall works on themes of anxiety, capturing video and looping it so as to suggest danger for the children (her own, I think in all cases here). I can see what she's doing, but it had the emotional subtlety of a sledgehammer. I felt manipulated, and, the more I saw, pissed off. Then again, that might just be a me thing. The installations were really beautiful, and the space given to each of the pieces really made it into something more than just the work itself.