Bodies of work: Alix Marie talks myth and muscle
Styx, 2022, set up view at Deichtorhallen Hamburg © Henning Rogge
Photography’s guidelines are made to be damaged. Having grow to be annoyed with the medium’s conventions, 5 artists focus on how sculpture, activism and X-rays maintain pictures alive of their work. Subsequent up: Alix Marie
Born in Paris, Alix Marie studied sculpture and pictures in London, the place she started difficult the connection between materials, picture and physique. Her work attracts on mythology, movie concept and widespread tradition to critique the stereotypes of gender and wider visible tradition. Perasma, her solo exhibition at MISC, Athens, runs till 20 September 2023.
Since I used to be a youngster I’ve been experimenting with each sculpture and pictures. In my BA at Central Saint Martins I used to be primarily doing sculpture, and then I did an MA in pictures on the Royal School of Artwork. However it was solely on the RCA that they began to merge. I used to be annoyed with the flatness of the print – and the medical side of pictures. A turning level was an RCA crit session the place I crumpled a print of a hand on a physique and put it in a nook of the constructing. The reactions from my classmates had been stunning and visceral – the sense was that I used to be harming the {photograph} in addition to the physique.
I wrote my RCA dissertation on pictures and fetishism, after Christian Metz’s 1985 essay, Photography and Fetish. I centered on indexicality and the connection between cloth and pictures. My strategy to sculpture and pictures is analogous as they relate to the index and the imprint; they’re each casting. Photography is casting with mild. The paintings is a hint of a physique at a given time and place. I’m an artist who works with very completely different supplies, nevertheless the {photograph}, and the photographic picture, has all the time been – and all the time can be – half of my apply.
My work usually mixes mythology and autobiography, coping with the illustration of the physique on a number of ranges. There’s my physique making the work – my labour and the repetitive acts of making. Then there are the our bodies I signify. The third part is the physique of the work itself, usually crossing from pictures to sculpture. And fourth is the physique of the spectator – offering a bodily viewing expertise is de facto vital to me. I come from a household of cinephiles, and maybe my curiosity in bodily fragmentation is expounded to the filmic picture. It is usually vital to me to image the our bodies round me as they’re – with out post-production – to push again towards magnificence requirements in mass media.
Shortly after I left the RCA, I confirmed in Ichor, a gaggle present at Danielle Arnaud, London, which is in a home. You aren’t allowed to place nails within the partitions, so with my works Slip/Slit and Bleu, I used to be serious about the home as a body and the best way to insert images within the structure. In my 2014 residency on the V&A, I used to be researching the gathering, which is the place I discovered X-rays of classical sculptures of gods.
This led to the works in my first solo present, La Femme Fontaine at Matèria gallery, Rome, in 2017. There was a play between the sculptures I made, which I noticed as images within the sense that they had been so detailed – goosebumps on the concrete, for instance – and the vintage sculptures which grew to become images. The concept was to render patriarchal gods flat, see-through and ghostlike.
My Roman Street, London, solo present, Shredded, was serious about the stereotypes of virility relatively than masculinity. It got here from my curiosity in Greek antiquity and mythology, and from dwelling reverse a 24-hour bodybuilding gymnasium, the place I may hear screams consistently. In bodybuilding you train and decide every physique half individually, so I felt it associated to my work via fragmentation as nicely. It’s the proper intersection between sculpture and pictures – the exhibition of the physique.
“I come from a household of cinephiles, and maybe my curiosity in bodily fragmentation is expounded to the filmic picture”
I actually imagine in content material and type coming collectively. The best way the pictures grow to be three-dimensional hyperlinks to every topic; I don’t simply make photographs 3D to make them extra attention-grabbing or attractive. So the inflatables in Shredded had been linked to the concept of muscular tissues inflating and deflating, and to an notorious quote [about ejaculation] by Arnold Schwarzenegger within the cult documentary Pumping Iron. In some of the sculptures, which resembled growing trays, I used glycerine, which some bodybuilders ingest earlier than competitors to enhance muscle definition. That, plus the spotlights within the set up made the pictures sweat. There have been water droplets on the prints of their torsos.
Photography is only one part of my sculptures and installations. Styx – which was tailored for my solo present at MISC, Athens – is a round construction partly as a result of Styx is a river and a goddess in Greek mythology. She is the boundary to the afterlife. The venture was co-commissioned throughout the pandemic by Photoworks UK and the Ballarat Worldwide Foto Biennale; the ceiling of Australia’s Nationwide Centre for Photography, the place it was going to be first proven, is made of metallic from shipyards. So I made the sculpture round to reference the motion of water. With this venture, concepts of ‘going via’ and ‘seeing via’ had been omnipresent. Going via an expertise – as with the pandemic or mourning – or transferring via water spatially, had been translated within the set up with the labyrinthine type. With the use of translucent materials and X-rays, I communicated this concept of seeing via, too.
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