Marni Marriott's Fugue State

Hunt Gallery is excited to announce Fugue State, a solo exhibition of new work by Marni Marriott.

Marni Marriott is a visual artist from Temiskaming Shores, Ontario. Her work is focused primarily on the deconstruction of the human figure, which she explores primarily in oil painting as well as digital and analog photography. Her practice explores collage methodologies, quilts and rural craft, pop culture and queer symbolism.

Drawing from a variety of pop cultural, historical, and autobiographical imagery, Marriott’s work explores the jarring and surreal quality of the image as a vehicle for the pagan, as outlined by Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. One of the central themes of Paglia’s work is the notion of murky sexual undercurrents, which she identifies as a pervasive force shaping human expression and creativity. Through her analysis, Paglia
reveals how Western culture has been deeply influenced by the dynamics of desire, taboo,
and subversion, often manifesting in complex and multifaceted ways.

Marriott approaches paintings as a kind of stage, highlighting theatrical representations of gender, sexuality, and the body, that taken out of their original contexts feel jarring and unfamiliar. By collecting reference material from a variety of sources
including films, television, video games, erotica and estate sales, she amasses a library of images that all share a similar quality of strange sexuality, glamor, violence, and dramatic personality.

Via the re-appropriation of the image, alongside her own references taken of her friends, and symbols from her upbringing in rural Northern Ontario, Marriott’s work is an attempt at creating new mythologies of the self. Central to these mythologies include the
transgender body, rural aesthetics, fashion, theatre, nightclubbing, and the supernatural.

Fugue State is Marriott’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition will open July 12 from 6-9pm.

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