Archive Body Projections: Denise Marika

Denise Marika's Webpage | Essay by George Fifield Essay by Judith Hoos Fox | Denise Marika Home Page Archive - Fall 2002 Home

Body Projections
New Video Sculpture by Denise Marika

This exhibition presented new video installations by one of Pomona College’s most distinguished alumni in the arts. Twenty-five years after graduating, Denise Marika is widely recognized as an artist of stature and vision. The Pomona College Museum of Art was proud to present this selection of her most recent video sculptures and to celebrate the accomplishments of an extraordinary artist.

Denise Marika considers herself a sculptor whose medium is video. First introduced to sculpture at Pomona, where she majored in art (class of ’77), she earned an M.F.A. at UCLA in 1984, working with artists Chris Burden (Pomona ’69) and Charles Ray who, along with Bruce Nauman were important early influences. Marika’s work explores the self and the body, collapses traditional boundaries between private and public, and confronts audiences with intensely personal images and issues. Marika has consistently used her own body as a vehicle for introducing private rituals and gestures into public spaces, and the formal rigor she brings to her explorations of intimate content reflects a deep respect for such historical figures as Michelangelo and Mantegna as well as more contemporary influences such as Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, and choreographer Pina Bausch. Marika’s synthesis of sculpture, performance, and video focuses on the repetitive and the mundane and encourages the viewer to meditate upon the poetics of ordinary gesture, thus underscoring our universal search for intimacy.

Marika’s most recent work pushes these interests to new levels of refinement, and this exhibition drew on three extraordinarily productive years to present both museum and site-specific installations. In the latter category, Liquid Glass, a video project that was installed in a south-facing window of Alexander Hall that could be seen at night from Stover Walk, was presented through the College’s Art on Campus program. The Museum’s exhibition extended as well to Los Angeles. For “TV or Not TV,” a citywide festival of video and new media sponsored by L.A. Freewaves, Marika created a site-specific video projection, In Supplication.

Denise Marika’s art has been exhibited in a number of major venues including New York’s Museum of Modern Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. This exhibition was the first to provide an in-depth survey of the artist’s work on the West Coast.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator