Lynne Marsh
Lynne Marsh: Who Raised It Up So Many Times?
September 25, 2021–January 9, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, October 16, 2021, 5–9 p.m.
UCR ARTS
Culver Center of the Arts, Jack and Marilyn Sweeney Art Gallery
3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
USA
UCR ARTS is pleased to present the first comprehensive U.S. solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Lynne Marsh. Who Raised It Up So Many Times? will be on view from September 25, 2021–January 9, 2022 at UCR ARTS’ Culver Center of the Arts, Jack and Marilyn Sweeney Art Gallery in downtown Riverside, California.
Who Raised It Up So Many Times? presents video installations and screenings by Marsh that explore labor and production in the realms of television, live performance, and 3D capture. A German TV news station, the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall, an English opera house, and a Southern California mixed-reality capture studio are all tapped to reveal the orchestrated, yet invisible, labor that underpins cultural production. Marsh’s works highlight the gestures, tools, and specialized skills that cultural workers of all kinds mobilize every day, inviting us to consider the manufacturing of images, sounds, and events. Utilizing up-to-the-minute technology while maintaining a historical view of mediated imagery, Marsh prompts us to reflect upon our roles, complicities, and pleasures as we create and consume images.
Her newest work, Ninfa Atlas (2021), debuts as a 5-channel video installation. For this piece, Marsh composed a 72-image score animating historical feminine figures from Western art and culture mined from the famous archive of art historian Aby Warburg. She collaborated with five Los Angeles-based performers who interpreted the score through gesture and movement, and then captured their performances in 3D. Ninfa Atlas manifests a translation process that carries the human figure from historic archive through embodied performance to digital asset. Marsh tracks the lives of these figures and their gestures as they adapt across technological eras, social contexts, and historical situations. Her approach highlights the complexities and problematics of cultural categorization and visual legibility.
“Marsh’s work is generous to us, its viewers. It elicits our perceptual abilities, rewards us with the pleasure of art appreciation, and prompts us to consider humanity in relation to mediation, technology, and the symbolic realm,” says independent curator and cultural producer Kimberli Meyer, who organized the exhibition. Meyer was formerly director of the University Art Museum at Cal State University Long Beach and director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House.
The exhibition is supported by UCR CHASS, City of Riverside, Kathy Wright & Dwight Tate, and Ann DeWolfe. The artist acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts; UCR Academic Senate; and Metastage, Los Angeles.
