Lynne Marsh: Who Raised It Up So Many Times?

UCR ARTS is pleased to present the first comprehensive US solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Lynne Marsh. Who Raised It Up So Many Times? will be on view from September 25, 2021–January 9, 2022 at UCR ARTS’ Culver Center of the Arts, Jack and Marilyn Sweeney Art Gallery in downtown Riverside, California.

Who Raised It Up So Many Times? presents video installations and screenings by Marsh that explore labor and production in the realms of television, live performance, and 3D capture. A German TV news station, the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall, an English opera house, and a Southern California mixed-reality capture studio are all tapped to reveal the orchestrated, yet invisible, labor that underpins cultural production. Marsh’s works highlight the gestures, tools, and specialized skills that cultural workers of all kinds mobilize every day, inviting us to consider the manufacturing of images, sounds, and events. Utilizing up-to-the-minute technology while maintaining a historical view of mediated imagery, Marsh prompts us to reflect upon our roles, complicities, and pleasures as we create and consume images.

Her newest work, Ninfa Atlas (2021), debuts as a 5-channel video installation. For this piece, Marsh composed a 72-image score animating historical feminine figures from Western art and culture mined from the famous archive of art historian Aby Warburg. She collaborated with five Los Angeles-based performers who interpreted the score through gesture and movement, and then captured their performances in 3D. Ninfa Atlas manifests a translation process that carries the human figure from historic archive through embodied performance to digital asset. Marsh tracks the lives of these figures and their gestures as they adapt across technological eras, social contexts, and historical situations. Her approach highlights the complexities and problematics of cultural categorization and visual legibility. 

“Marsh’s work is generous to us, its viewers. It elicits our perceptual abilities, rewards us with the pleasure of art appreciation, and prompts us to consider humanity in relation to mediation, technology, and the symbolic realm,” says independent curator and cultural producer Kimberli Meyer, who organized the exhibition. Meyer was formerly director of the University Art Museum at Cal State University Long Beach and director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House.

The exhibition is supported by UCR CHASS, City of Riverside, Kathy Wright & Dwight Tate, and Ann DeWolfe. The artist acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts; UCR Academic Senate; and Metastage, Los Angeles. 

A guided tour of the exhibition with the artist and curator and other related programs are coming this fall. Visit UCR ARTS for details.

Opening reception registration.

Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles. She enlists moving image, performance, and installation into an ongoing inquiry of specific sites of human spectacle. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Berlinische Galerie; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Toronto International Film Festival; and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou; La Biennale de Montréal; the Québec City Biennial; and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. 

UCR ARTS advances the understanding and appreciation of the arts through extraordinary experiences in contemporary visual and performing art and photography and photographic technologies, past and present. Presenting major exhibitions, artist projects, performances and community programs, and independent and foreign language films, UCR ARTS engages both global and regional audiences.

UCR ARTS opened in 2010, bringing together the California Museum of Photography (founded in 1973), the Jack and Marilyn Sweeney Art Gallery (1963), and the Barbara & Art Culver Center of the Arts (2010). Admission is free thanks to the generosity of sponsors Altura Credit Union and Anheuser-Busch.