My work engages qualities of holding: holding still, holding together, holding apart, holding harmless. Acts of holding create relationships between bodies, between objects, and between transitional moments. Holding participates in touch, form, and the stops and starts of time.
A lifelong pursuit, my practice evolves through engaging the functional and aesthetic resonance of things. Objects hold the potential to visually delight and to express habits of use. In recent work, plastic detritus has become the starting point for an examination of the logic and breakdown of material culture. Shaped to wrap around something recognizable, these objects evolve into ambiguous, secondary forms that populate an invasive ecosystem of want and desire.
Ideas and matter bend at the boundary between opposites - soft/hard, light/heavy, ephemeral/durable. I am interested in the tension between the flexible and the fixed. Formal training in architecture grounds my work in the physical properties of materials. I respond to material behavior with novel strategies of assembly that yield surprising visual and tactile compositions.
Rooted in process, my practice attempts to engage a holistic world. I work from personal experience and curiosity that finds influences in systems and physical structures. I also attempt to work without waste, pulling marks and gleanings from previous works into the next pieces like a continuous thread.
BIO
Marianne Desmarais (b. 1972, Gulfport, MS) lives and works in New Orleans. Recent solo exhibitions have been mounted at On The Point, Staple Goods Gallery, and the CAC. Her work has been included in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial and she has participated in numerous group shows at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Center for Contemporary Art in New Orleans. In 2016, the CAC presented her sculpture Glyphic Figure in a limited edition as the Silver Circle Sculpture. Desmarais has enjoyed residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center (2019/20) and the Banff Centre (2003). Her work has traveled internationally with the Imago Mundi collection for the Benetton Foundation and is in the permanent collection of SCAD, Shanghai. Desmarais also works on large-scale, collaborative public art projects nationally. She studied abroad at the Edinburgh College of Art and has received Master of Architecture I + II degrees from Tulane University (95) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (2002) respectively.