Marnie Weber — The Nature of Time — Praz-Delavallade Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 23 → April 13, 2013

Thematizing the passage of time, Marnie Weber’s new exhibition is composed of a series of painted panels representing the four seasons, and a series of 366 collages, called The Diary Project.

Time is defined and marked by our experiences. It is held accountable by occasions of note, sometimes events of importance and other times, not. Time is something that is hard to grasp and can only be reflected upon as memory, a photograph, a story or simply measured out by tic of a clock. Time can be fictionalized and romanticized through photographs and imagery that trigger our memories. As an artist who is interested in creating fiction and distorting reality, Marnie Weber is constantly viewing the world through eyes which look for the dramatic and theatrical over the mundane.

The Diary Project is an exploration and unearthing of thirty years of archived images. Marnie Weber imagined it as somewhat of a retrospective of her collected imagery in collage form, using photographic clippings from previous bodies of works, as well as imagery pulled from magazines. Making one collage a day, and given it was a leap year, there are 366 collages in total. Marnie Weber continued her other work as an artist all along: a trip to Oaxaca Mexico for Day of the Dead, hunting for monster masks, celebrating holidays, enjoying the seasons, shooting her new movie, creating exhibitions, doing performances, playing music and traveling are all reflected in these collages, as are many days of mundane happiness as well as some days of sadness and heart-ache. The colourful characters that appear in costumes are drawn from the artist’s work in performance and film. Dolls appear throughout as left overs from her earlier dollhouse series. Some of Weber’s early collage imagery, with nude figures taken from soft-core skin magazines, also re-emerges, and bodies of work such as The Spirit Girls are given yet another new life. Little girls and nature seem to be a reoccurring theme, and can be understood as a reflection on a childhood spent in the countryside in rural Connecticut. Hundreds of animals frolic through the days; ghostly apparitions, the spiritual and the surreal are as present as ever.

Accompanying the series of collages is a new series of painted and collaged panels that represent the four seasons in a romanticized and surreal manner. Arms sprout from tress in snowy vistas, bodies float through the summer sea, spring has little girls blooming as flowers, and fall is the artist herself in the character of a scarecrow. The show is to be viewed and understood as a culmination of the artist’s life. A life spent gathering imagery, working in collage, creating characters through costuming and performance, and revisiting all of these passions together in one place, image by image, day by day, and moment by moment.

Marnie Weber is a Los Angeles-based artist. She attended the University of Southern California in the late 1970s and received her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1981. Webers first public persona was as a member of the art-rock band The Party Boys and eventually as a solo performer in clubs and art venues locally and internationally. In the early 1980s, she began making collages by cutting pictures of women from magazines and placing them in serene and bucolic settings. In the 1990s, Weber’s performance and video work segued into multi-media installations that included sculpture, video, and even more elaborate collages. Her work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows. Recent solo exhibitions include “Marnie Weber, Forever Free, the Cinema show”, a retrospective at Le Magasin — Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (2010) and “The Autumn Bear” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2011). Last Fall, her installation “The Whispering Cave” was on view as part of “Lille 3000” in Lille, France. Weber’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris.