About Anja Marais

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So far Anja Marais has created 117 blog entries.

Eros Effect at Bridge Red [exhibition]

Curated by Jane Hart

Disintegration is Transformation / Transformation is Disintegration / 2018 / Decollage Mixed Media

November 4, 2018 through January 6, 2019

Sunday, November 4, 4-7pm opening reception

Sunday, January 6, noon-3pm closing reception

CALL:  3057901797 for an appointment on other days.

Bridge Red Studios/Project Space

12425 NE 13th Ave. #5, North Miami, FL 33161

The exhibition title draws upon a term coined by philosopher George Katsiaficas in his book “The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968,” the concept of the “eros effect” is a means of rescuing the revolutionary value of spontaneity, a way to stimulate a reevaluation of the unconscious and strengthen the will of popular movements to remain steadfast in their revulsion with war, inequality, and domination.

50 years ago in 1968, a surge in societal and personal awareness brought tremendous creativity as well as tumult, leading to sweeping changes both culturally and socially. This exhibition focuses upon how 50 years on, artists working in all media, are addressing aspects of these issues given our world today. The gallery space will become an activated, evocative environment that serves to be both thought-provoking and inspirational. – Jane Hart

By |2018-12-05T11:52:54+00:00November 2nd, 2018|

Santa Fe Art Institute Residency [summary]

 

Sante Fe Art Institute Art Studio: Mixed Media work – “The Three Architects”

I attended the thematic “Truth and Reconciliation” art residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute this September.

I participated in an exhilarating dialogue with international artists regarding this complicated theme.

Voices participating were from Colombia, Israel, Native American, South Africa, Taiwan. etc.

From my Notebook:

As artists, we do not always have the answers but we do
make the unconscious conscious.

To make art you first need to consume yourself.
Devouring your own flesh until personhood is gone.
Only then you become the other.
When you are the “other” you are not the artist
you are part of the collective heart.

Jung said that until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Antonin Artaud declared that art was the double of life, a
duplicate reality. “We have a spirit so made that
it spends its life looking for itself … In becoming
conscious, it duplicates itself.

Artists as witnesses are duplicates,
they contain both the subject and the object.
the self and the other.
the truth and the lies.

Santa Fe Art Institute Art Studio – Work in Progress

By |2018-12-04T09:38:45+00:00September 25th, 2018|

Blue Star Contemporary [Exhibition]

Soot on the grass, 2016, Photo-collage transfer on Found Fabric and burnt wood, 28 in x 82 in x 8in

The Crossing, 2015, Mixed Media on Found Table Cloth, Soil, and Found Objects, 73in x 115in x 20in

FROM UNDERFOOT: BREAKING THROUGH SURFACE AND GROUND

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

The works in this exhibition feature in some shape or form the ground as part of the subject and the artists focus. The surface of the earth is depicted as an active space, laden with tension. The artists featured reflect on the landscape and emphasize changes above and below gravel and grass, with subtle yet moving references to natural and manmade disasters. We can also find themes of how we reflect on the passage of time and mortality through the landscape, with references of resurrection, rejuvenation, erosion, and growth.

Location: Blue Star Contemporary

Address: 116 Bue Star, San Antonio, Texas
Museum Hours: TH FR 10am-8pm | SA SU 10am-6pm 

By |2018-06-06T10:27:30+00:00June 6th, 2018|

Catalog for Bridge Red Exhibition [flip book]

By |2018-05-09T10:35:15+00:00May 9th, 2018|

The Mountain Without a Shadow [exhibition]

Location: BRIDGE RED
Address: 12425 NE 13TH AVE, North Miami, FL 33161
Dates: Friday, April 8, 2018 | 4 pm – 7 pm

Exhibition Ends May 27th

In “The Mountain Without a Shadow” themes of displacement and cultural heritage permeate Anja Marais’ work. Often using photography combined with found objects, her work is imbued with a ritualistic quality. Central to Marais’ work is the disintegration of material, creating apt metaphors for the human condition, geography, and memory.

Born in South Africa and now living in Miami, Marais’ work challenges the viewer to rethink the meaning of systematic conditioning. Photography forms the basis of much of her mixed media work, but she also employs more archaic materials like maize, soil, rust, etc to realize her works.

Whilst Marais’ work subtly alludes to the impact of racism in South Africa – a country immersed in political and social turmoil during her upbringing – her themes have a universal appeal. Marais reinforces this:

‘…. I am interested in interpreting direct experiences that contradict our conditioning. With first-hand experience we don’t see things as they are, but how we see them as we are. An opportunity to discover dissonance between what we know and what we are born with ‘

The exhibition comprises nine of Marais’ most telling works from multiple projects around ‘the sins of the fathers’. In ‘The Transparency of Rocks‘, one of the larger pieces in the exhibition, Marais combines images of a child merging with rocks, a reflection on carrying the transgressions of our forefathers.

In ‘A Poem for the Sharpevilles‘, she uses press images from traumatic events in history and washes them away to recede and merge into the landscape, an attempt to memorialize landscape as a mute witness to the actions of man.

Also featured are recent sculpture works. These include found objects enmeshed with Maize. Corn is a staple food in Africa as in many other countries and is used in rituals of the ancestors.

“Libation for the Lineage of the Unlived.” is a video work that combines ritual and ethnopoetics bringing the outside and ‘other’ world into the space of the gallery.

By |2018-04-05T06:50:57+00:00April 4th, 2018|