|
Malerie Marder, Past Present,
2007
Archival pigment print, 101.6cm x 147.3cm
Courtesy
of Blain|Southern, London
MALERIE MARDER
6 - 21
April 2011
Blain|Southern is delighted to present
a series of previously unexhibited photographs by the American
artist Malerie Marder, staged to mark the publication of
Carnal Knowledge, the result of the artist’s four-year
collaboration with Violette Editions.
Ever
since she first started exhibiting her photos in the late
1990s, Marder has explored the psychosexual undertow of her
own intimate relationships, frequently shooting herself, along
with family and friends, in close quarters (including
pay-by-the-hour motels) and, usually, undressed. Her work
flirts with prurience, with ideas of privacy and surveillance,
eroticism and pornography, and the complications of
love.
Discussing ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ Marder says: “I
used to have anxiety about my pictures exposing things too
private, but the real intimacies are censored out. I still get
pangs of self-consciousness, but it’s too late for regret.
What was I thinking when I made the pictures? This is in no
particular order: fate, kink, performance, a secret,
nostalgia, sensual memory, voyeurism, nighttime settings,
barren rooms, stark lighting, romantic trysts, foreign
environments, intimacy, lack of intimacy, connection, lack of
connection, self-reflection, lack of self-reflection,
awkwardness, isolation, random, purpose, shadow,
vulnerability, immaturity, innocence, amorous bodies,
ambiguity, cocoons of emotion, modernist architecture,
transience, lurid smells, a patient’s sickbed, love,
eroticism, clarity, blushing, bruised, family, boyfriends,
conflict, loyalty, disapproval, neuroticism, narcissism,
truculence, numbness, sexual discomfort, subconscious, and the
past. None of it is relevant now.”*
Marder’s most recent project, titled “Anatomy”, has
been photographing call girls and their customers in a brothel
in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Carnal Knowledge, which will be published in
May by Violette Editions, includes 70 works by Marder and
features a preface by Gregory Crewdson, a text by novelist
James Ellroy, short stories inspired by Marder's works by A.M.
Homes, James Frey and Bruce Wagner, and a written and
photographic correspondence between Marder and Philip-Lorca
diCorcia.
About Malerie Marder:
Marder studied at Bard College with Stephen Shore and
at Yale University with Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca
diCorcia and Nan Goldin, where she won the Schicke-Collingwood
Prize and John Ferguson Weir Award. Her work is in several
international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne)
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). She lives and
works in Los Angeles.
*
Taken from an email correspondence between Marder and the
American photographer, Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
BLAIN|SOUTHERN
21
Dering Street
London
W1S 1AL
T: +44
(0)20 7493 4492
|
