Anja Marais cordially invites you to an art viewing at her studio. Viewing includes her newest works. Art studios by neighbor artists will also be open to the public: Babette Hershberger, Kerry Phillips, Christian Bernard, Olivier Dubois-Cherrier and Ana Carballosa.
‘The Famished Road ‘ is an installation created for the exhibition “Intersections” that will open in Miami at the Deering Estate on
SATURDAY, APRIL 16th, 3:30 – 10:00 pm
‘The Famished Road‘ Speaks of the displaced and the current refugee crisis of our world. Those that live in a state of makeshift between borders seeking shelter not just from the elements but from the shadows of humanity.
Mixed Media, found objects and Photo montage – 2016 – 8′ x 15′ x 15′
Exhibition ends June 6th, 2016
February 3rd – March 1st
Artist Lecture: Wednesday, February 3rd from 3 – 4 pm, CBS Auditorium
A reception will be held immediately following the lecture.
University of the Arts
Sculpture Gallery / Hamilton Hall Lower Level
320 S Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19102
Up flight of the Wingless Bird, 2015, 85″ x 79″, Photomontage, ink on recycled fabric
I have recently returned from a month-long art residency in Johnson Vermont. One of the largest art residencies in the country that housed up to 50 artists and writers a month. Some of my random notes and observances from my journal I kept there:
1.
Sitting next to a brook, the sun out and the mountains defined. The rain has temporarily dissipated. I can see as far back as I can see ahead. The water at my feet, a conveyor belt of fluid glass, moving towards the ocean. I myself a stream joining other trickling brooks to roar together to the unknown sea. To be part of the ocean again, the home we all came from. Surrounded by many artists (over fifty of them), each a fingerprint, I can see the hand.
2.
Most artists work is directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously about their childhood.
3.
The poet Olena Kalytiak Davis asked: ” Do you create to impress or do you create to engage?”, while she absent-mindedly tucks on the top button of her blouse. Reading Keats, she tucks and tucks.
4.
The river spoke to me, a one-sided conversation. The blind woman taught me that I do not see, I do not listen, as she played sweet tunes to the water on her wooden recorder. I remembered that I can speak back and I apologized for my verbal absence. The river forgave me as she gurgled ” Never be mute, never be blind”
5.
The river further said: “Like me, carry fuel, draw water because you should offer the viewer of your art living water”
6.
A caveat: Silence, the kind you hear at night in the middle of the forest, in the back of the library, or face underwater in your bathtub. No more air in my lungs, no more gelatine in my joints. Because I asked the wrong questions, everything was contaminated. I got silence. Questions that tarred my decisions, dulled my output, feathered my impact. Don’t you know by now that art cannot redeem the world? Don’t you know that your questions are too small? Asking for acceptance is verbal cancer.
7.
Think back when you were a child, you saw the world as a non-duality, you viewed it with no connections. That envelope of time before racism, apartheid, bigotry, terrorism, exclusiveness, for it bore no name.
8.
Some artists have nothing to say. Some artists built scaffolding around their work to appear that they are saying something. Some artists work speaks because it has unvoiced flames, rapids and to-be-burst clouds.
9.
To be older than fire, to be older than the sea, you the “i” needs to die.
10.
An artist passing by said that if art is not funny, he is not interested. Are we clowns or are we messengers? Are you the jester or are you the healer? Amusing ourselves to death, we are laughing as the tides are rising.
11.
Before society pressed us through the meat minder into perfect little meatballs, we were the cow. We were the grass inside the cow. We were the milk inside the udder, the air in the lungs. The same air that blankets the planet. The same planet that is a warm pocket in a universe. The same universe peppered with particles, gas and radiation. The time before “i”, before the meatball was baptized as “i”.
12.
I love poets, artists, and dreamers. They give me hope, they give me solace. They show me, as Ben Okri said, the falseness of our limitations and the true extent of our kingdom.
http://www.uncmirror.com/news/view.php/1012178/Anja-Marais-Exploring-balance
Anja Marais: Exploring balance
Southern Florida artist’s work displayed in Northern Colorado gallery
By Trevor Reid
On October 4, 2015
Mark Harro | The Mirror
“The Ballast” installation, a project that uses different pieces to encompass the story of a woman’s struggle to find balance.
When thinking of mythology, most people picture ancient writers. Anja Marais, a South African artist now featured at the Mariani Gallery in Guggenheim Hall, is breaking that stereotype.
Building a mythos through her exhibit “The Ballast,” Marais constructs a tale of the human struggle to find balance. Using photographs from her short film “Cathedral,” Marais ties together the works in her exhibit to present various aspects of this myth to viewers.
The story of a woman struggling to find both stability on the waters of time and freedom from the rocks of her past, “The Ballast” invites viewers to explore this constant struggle faced by humanity.
Q: What inspired this exhibit?
A: My life. (Marais laughs) The title of this exhibit is called “The Ballast” and when I worked on this project, I was thinking about how I will maintain my own balance in life. And when I work in my studio, I don’t just make one painting. I usually work on a whole project.So the whole project is based on questions I have about my life because I found the more personal my work becomes, the more universal it is as well. The ballast is when you have a ship, and you want to keep it buoyant – when it’s empty, you have to fill up the new cargo ships of the day with water and it keeps its equilibrium with the water level. Whereas the old school, they fill it up with rocks. And that way, it stays steady. So as they try to stay steady, they have to empty out rocks or put in more rocks, or take out water or add more water.
As I made this project, I started asking the question, “How do you stay in balance? And when do you know when to empty yourself? And when is it time to fill yourself to stay stable?” This is my way of working through those questions. I also believe the reason why I make art is not necessarily the interpretation I feel people should have for the work. I want them to come with their own ideas and read their own thing in it.
Q: I noticed a similarity in all of the works. Did you start on one of these pieces and expand it into the exhibit?
A: I started with the film, which is called a pixilation animation. That’s when you do a stop-animation without dolls, so you use live humans and an actual environment. For this film, which is about seven minutes, I took between 8,000 and 9,000 photographs. And then I time-lapsed it, and then you have a stop animation. So I have 8,000 to 9,000 photographs that I then recycled back into photographic mixed media collages, and then you have this coherency about it so the works have a similar dialogue towards each other.
Q: How long have you been creating art?
A: Since I could think. Since I could remember, I was making art, and I always wanted to be an artist. My poor dad, who was a science and biology teacher, tried everything in his power for me not to become an artist, but I was adamant.
He always said, “No, it’s something you can do as a hobby.” But that’s all I wanted to be and here I am, I’m still doing it, and it’s the only thing I ever want to do.
Q: Is there a piece in this exhibit that you enjoyed making most?
A: Because it’s one project, and because I make all the work roughly at the same time, there’s a thread that goes through all of them and I enjoy the thread that goes in all of them, not necessarily a specific work. It’s like a little family. So it’s like saying, “The nephew is nicer than the cousin, but they all have the same genes.”
Q: Who are your top three inspirations when creating art?
A: I’m weird in the sense that I’m not as influenced by other artists as I’m influenced by writers. I have a deep love for Russian writers and poets. One of my favorite poets is Anna Akhmatova. And writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I have this thing going on for Russia, and I am so enamored with Andrei Tarkovsky–he’s a filmmaker–but he also wrote beautiful poetry. He always said that his film was just poetry, so that’s really what inspired me. And, of course, I’m inspired by a lot of South African writers.
Q: If you could bring back one thing from Colorado to Florida, what would it be?
A: I would bring back my lungs, so I could breathe again. I’m struggling a little bit with the air.
I really enjoy the people. They have been so gracious and so hospitable and kind. I found the students to be very stable and very intelligent.
