Helen Marten. Evian Disease

Evian Disease, 2012 by HELEN MARTEN
animation by ADAM SINCLAIR
digital 3D animation, 28 minutes, 46 seconds
courtesy the artist

For those not familiar with HELEN MARTEN, she is a British artist based in London who graduated from the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University in 2008 and has since had several solo exhibitions, the most recent at Chisenhale Gallery in London (November 2012 – January 2013).

Evian Disease was especially created for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and presented during the Season II – Imagine the Imaginary (September 2012 -February 2013).

MARTEN explores the relation between our modern lifestyle and the organic environment we are living in. To this end, the spectator is lead to an internal journey of a collusion of shape, texture, colour, and sound narrated by 6 different voices; who state through a realistic description of a modern apartment, a cartoon model-less fashion show or an animated hand holding a cigarette to name a few- how humans perpetually protect themselves from nature with superficial artefact. – DELPHINE DESANE for Garage Magazine 

More generally, HELEN MARTEN‘s wide-ranging work, which includes installations, sculptures, and videos, is characterized by a burlesque questioning of ownership and dishonesty in materials, the relationship of object to artefact, and of package to product. The whole mixed with a viral use of iconic images, domestic objects, signs and popular references.

My list of materials could run for pages, ranging from spaghetti and foliage to silk-screened leather, tequila, and bent rebar. It’s pornographically tactile; there is so much saturation in the skin of it because the surfaces have traces of touch invested in them. The list is madly indulgent—an engorged yet stylized stuffing of substance. Because the majority of objects are recognizable, they have a weirdly slippery, slightly uncanny status that activates a process of slippage or breakdown: Things are continually folding in and around themselves. There’s a lot of density, but at the same time I hope the work possesses a kind of lightness; there are recognizable outlines and things we can index or name. There is a universal hook as each substance is translatable: pasta, keys, chairs—all things that add up to images with related functionalities, histories, or social temperatures. – HELEN MARTEN

Stay on wfw and watch Dust and Piranhas (2011), the first digital animation by HELEN MARTENwritten and composed in response to the Serpentine Gallery Pavillon 2011.

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