Marci Washington - Dark Mirror

(Thursday) (Saturday)

"I am interested in depicting a decadent society in the midst of crisis. I would like to tell a story set in a time that is both past and present - a carefully constructed collapse of historical time capable of revealing what is common between our society now and societies in the past, as well as what is unique to our particular historical moment. In this work I am focusing on the commonalities between our time and Edwardian England, the decadent height of British imperialism, a time of empire for the sake of empire, on the eve of World War I and the beginning of the empire's decline.

 

Through the metaphors of the haunted house, the ancestral curse, and cannibalism/vampirism, I am exploring America's relationship to it's own past as well as that of imperial England as a haunting, a curse, and an ideological infection. I am interested in the cyclical nature of history as opposed to ideas of linear progress, especially how this relates to past and current ideas of American exceptionalism and the way those ideas have doomed us to repeat a history that we have felt entitled to ignore.

 

Through the metaphor of the ghost, I am exploring the role of repression in the building of societies at large. I am interested in repressions role in personal and national identity through the prescription of rigid social roles and simplistic cultural narratives, and in literalizing the return of the repressed and specter of the other in the form of hauntings. I am especially interested in the presence of surplus repression as a form of alienating social sickness indicating a tipping point where civilizing forces become excessive, restrictive and ultimately unstable.

 

I am building this story as if I am illustrating a novel that doesn't exist. If it did, it would probably be a lot like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or Bleak House - novels which use the popular conventions of fiction in order to seduce you into a story which ultimately functions as social commentary. I would like to highjack the ideological function of fiction - appropriating the character types and narrative conventions in order to construct an allegorical tale capable of challenging the simplistic cultural narrative of our own time in order to reaveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire fueling the "progress" of a capitalist society in decline."

 

Marci Washington received her BFA (2002) and MFA (2008) from the California College of the Arts. This exhibit will be her first solo show at Rena Bransten Gallery.


Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street
94108 San Francisco, CA
www.renabranstengallery.com
info@renabranstengallery.com


Phone: +1 415 982 3292
Fax: +1 415 982 1807

Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street
94108 San Francisco, CA
United states
Array
http://www.renabranstengallery.com

Selection of further exhibitions in: United states

24.01.3086 - 24.03.3086
Mexican and Latino Art Museum | San Francisco | In Association With The Smithsonian Institution - Th
Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D
San Francisco

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Marci Washington - Dark Mirror Rena Bransten Gallery Main address: Rena Bransten Gallery 77 Geary Street 94108 San Francisco, CA, United states Rena Bransten Gallery 77 Geary Street 94108 San Francisco, CA, United states

"I am interested in depicting a decadent society in the midst of crisis. I would like to tell a story set in a time that is both past and present - a carefully constructed collapse of historical time capable of revealing what is common between our society now and societies in the past, as well as what is unique to our particular historical moment. In this work I am focusing on the commonalities between our time and Edwardian England, the decadent height of British imperialism, a time of empire for the sake of empire, on the eve of World War I and the beginning of the empire's decline.

 

Through the metaphors of the haunted house, the ancestral curse, and cannibalism/vampirism, I am exploring America's relationship to it's own past as well as that of imperial England as a haunting, a curse, and an ideological infection. I am interested in the cyclical nature of history as opposed to ideas of linear progress, especially how this relates to past and current ideas of American exceptionalism and the way those ideas have doomed us to repeat a history that we have felt entitled to ignore.

 

Through the metaphor of the ghost, I am exploring the role of repression in the building of societies at large. I am interested in repressions role in personal and national identity through the prescription of rigid social roles and simplistic cultural narratives, and in literalizing the return of the repressed and specter of the other in the form of hauntings. I am especially interested in the presence of surplus repression as a form of alienating social sickness indicating a tipping point where civilizing forces become excessive, restrictive and ultimately unstable.

 

I am building this story as if I am illustrating a novel that doesn't exist. If it did, it would probably be a lot like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or Bleak House - novels which use the popular conventions of fiction in order to seduce you into a story which ultimately functions as social commentary. I would like to highjack the ideological function of fiction - appropriating the character types and narrative conventions in order to construct an allegorical tale capable of challenging the simplistic cultural narrative of our own time in order to reaveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire fueling the "progress" of a capitalist society in decline."

 

Marci Washington received her BFA (2002) and MFA (2008) from the California College of the Arts. This exhibit will be her first solo show at Rena Bransten Gallery.


Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street
94108 San Francisco, CA
www.renabranstengallery.com
info@renabranstengallery.com


Phone: +1 415 982 3292
Fax: +1 415 982 1807

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