The Art of Marianne Magne
Written by Silke Tudor
Saturday, 12 February 2011
HI FRUCTOSE
New Comtemporary art magazine
Marianne Magne should be the hero in an H.P. Lovecraft story: A bold beautiful French explorer who is able to reach between the folds of our common human experience, wrestle with the creatures she finds there, and drag their haunting images from just beyond the fringe. Using cibachrome, a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process which Magne transfers to aluminum and manipulates, a frozen television frame reveals a man locked in the torment of an eternal underworld; a photograph of a beautiful young woman is scarcely but poignantly recognizable as her soft tissue gives way to a crouching spirit of only slightly malevolent mien. Human forms seem to emerge from the textures of rust, charcoal, and dusky light, only to be reabsorbed. Abstraction becomes refraction and though the effect is beautiful and unshakeable, it is often quite dark.
In one series, inspired by human body parts (her own and those of friends), pictures have been manipulated, deconstructed, and reconstructed (burning, scratching, drawing) over the course of many years, making for a near-organic evolution of form that slips between microcosmic and extraterrestrial. Magne’s short films and sculptures inhabit a similar plane between the earthly and the ethereal, and are often rooted in a single photograph taken decades earlier. It is an interconnected world of fantasy and ancestry where cells easily morph into intergalactic cephalopods, and bones become cathedrals that inspire myths. -
The Art of Singing Electric
Written by Daniela Walsh
21 August 2005
OC REGISTER News Paper
“Exquisite Electric” at CalState Fullerton Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana
Jim Campbell - Adam Chapman - Marianne Magne - Tony Oursler - John Slepian - Camille Utterback
[...] Those with preconceptions of new techno - mediums being intellectually engaging but visually blah will come away surprised. Marianne Magne's two-part video installation, "Transitory Conditions, 2005," is mesmerizingly beautiful. It consists of streaming video loosely suggesting DNA ribbons in motion and the spiritual core of evolution along with still photographs that, through clever visual machination, compress the lengthy metamorphosis of animal into man (and vice-versa, if you will).[...]
Pay attention, Exquisite Electric demands you participate
Written by Justin E. Coffey
august 2005
OC WEEKLY
[...] Also, don't simply whiz past Marianne Magne's Transitory Conditions (2005), a kaleidoscopic floor-to-ceiling AV presentation merging Rorschach’s famous test, Lynch’s industrial rumblings and Serrano’s Blood and Semen series.
BioBallistic
Written by Ryan Griffis
March 2005
art US magazine
[...] Then there are the two-dimensional works of Tony Berlant and Marianne Magne that challenge the process of perception as much as the materiality of the objects themselves [...] In a technologically contemporary compression of macro and micro realities, Magne’s Anamorphosis Botanica depicts a fictional microscopic life form composed of images of herself [...]
Stinky Summer, Fresh Art
Written by James Kalm
July 2000
NY ARTS
[...] Marianne Magne produces works that escapes easy classification. Although Photographic, they have been ripped, collaged, altered, painted and rephotographed. The result pictures figures frayed and gashed, distorted and torqued with echoes of Arnulf Rainer or Francis Bacon [...]
Art pick of the week
Written by Peter Frank
Nov 1999
L.A. WEEKLY
[...] The gnarled shards of ceramic Marianne Magne partly embeds in drifts of sand, however bonelike they might seem, also conjure a peculiar weather and an equally odd geology.
Photo Genesis
Written by Joseph Woodward
Dec 1999
Los Angeles TIMES
"The Body Palimpsest" Nov 8 – Dec 15 at Brand Library Art Galleries, Glendale.
Imagery renewed: Artfully abused imagery is the medium and the message for Marianne Magne, whose show "'The Body Palimpsest," hangs in the Brand's Atrium Gallery. Photography is the basis of Magne's work, but her post-image manipulation is integral to the end result. Magne has scratched, painted over, added filters and overlays to original pictures, often of female nudes, that take on new potential meanings through the artist's handiwork. Sometimes, the viewer's response is triggered more by the power of suggestion than by explicit references: "As red as I can see," for example, implies violence through its blood-red scrim, but the source image is innocent enough. "Bleu cathodic #1" depicts pained faces distorted in a way that reminds us of painter Francis Bacon's twisted figurative touch. In Magne's work, beauty is submerged, sullied and rerouted through various processes.
LA Weekly Calendar
Written by Shana Nys Damdrot
March 30 2013
LA WEEKLY
…then suddenly you come upon it – a glimmering, luminous, organic spectacle of flickering light and shifting audio cloud that seem to emanate from the watery sky itself. This is Cellular Streams/transitory Conditions, a site specific multimedia installation presented by Ceci N’est Pas..from artist Marianne Magne, who has been producing variations of this work since 2005. Her work in drawing, painting, film, video, performance and music centers on the inner workings of living organisms as a metaphor and location for creativity. She often uses imagery of blood, neurology and other biological systems in her sensual abstract art. In this series she also recognizes the canals and bridges as a kind of living, fluid place, and the works she stages here delves deeply into this evolving story – with music, nature, and warm bodies all converging to the experience.