A NEW VIDEO INSTALLATION BY BOSTON-BASED VIDEO SCULPTOR DENISE MARIKA OPENS AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
The Museum's Video Gallery Reopens with a New Work that Uses
Three-Dimensional and Time-Based Media To Examine Issues of Vulnerability
and Power
More Weight
November 15,
1996January 26, 1997
The Museum of Modern Art reopens its
third-floor Garden Hall Video Gallery on November 15, 1996, with a new
installation by Boston-based video sculptor Denise Marika. Marika is well
known for work that combines three-dimensional and time-based media; the
installation, More Weight, features a video loop of lifesize nude
figures projected onto a large rectangular structure made of metal and
felt.
In the video a woman is carrying a man and struggling to keep from
dropping him. She moves forward, gasping from the weight, trying to keep
him in her arms. The only sound is of her labored breathing and footfalls.
The man is motionless and vulnerable, arms and legs hanging, like a
sleeping child. The drama plays out endlessly—with the woman working
hard to avoid causing injury to herself or her charge—and is both
disturbing and absurd.
The large structure on which the video is
projected—roughly 12 feet high, 7 feet wide, and 3 feet
deep—consists of layers of pink felt unevenly packed into an
industrial metal frame. The felt adds color to the almost monochromatic
images; at the same time, its folds and creases disfigure the projected
bodies. While the sculptural materials and the emotional content of the
video performance are wholly contemporary, the bodies recall nude figures
from ancient Greece and Rome and the woman's struggle makes reference to
that of Sisyphus.
"I am interested in the classicism present in
Denise's work, and also in the idea of how video and performance merge with
sculpture," says Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and
Video, who organized the installation. "Denise's work is three-dimensional
but, being time based, it has a strange quality that imposes itself on, and
startles, the viewer."
More Weight continues Marika's
aesthetic strategy of juxtaposing industrial materials and performances of
intimate human activities. The latter usually focus on personal ritual:
rocking, pacing, turning away, physically struggling. Marika then creates a
sculptural form that physically encloses, shapes, or otherwise defines the
video image.
"By projecting moving images onto steel I-beams, along a
conveyor track, onto animal hides and latex swings," Marika says, "I am
setting up a dialogue and a tension between image, motion, and sculptural
form, physicalizing the territory of conflict, internal and
external."
More Weight will be on exhibition through January 26,
1997.
Marika is a 1984 M.F.A. graduate of the University of California,
Los Angeles. She has had recent one-person exhibitions at the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum and the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, and the
Arthur Roger Gallery in New York and New Orleans, and has been included in
numerous group shows. She has also received several commissions from city
agencies. Crossing, her 1994 installation for the town of Brookline,
Massachusetts, was the topic of much debate about public art.
More
Weight is made possible with support from the New York State Council on
the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Contemporary Arts
Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and the Panasonic Corporation. The
installation itself is supported by the Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston,
with partial funding from the New England Film/Video Fellowship Program at
the Boston Film/Video Council.
