Binding Ties, Michelle Marcuse Artist Statement

Michelle Marcuse, October 26.2023

I identify as a South African American artist. My work is a visual exploration of aesthetics, cultural amalgamation, and traditions. From my upbringing, I find profound inspiration in the cultural aesthetics that nurtured me during my formative years, influencing the nuanced way in which I process and articulate my thoughts.

My artistic focus is connected to the interplay between identity, history, and shared encounters—a narrative of self-determination that has evolved from the broader context of my childhood. I am intrigued with aesthetic fusion stemming from cultural osmosis. I view the development of expression as an opportunity to embrace both individualism and the collective self.

Seeking to contribute to a broader discourse on the intricacies of human ingenuity, I navigate familiar influences through innovation. My chosen mediums—wire, raffia, string, paint, and cardboard—are selected for their malleability, while additional elements like gouache, acrylic paint, graphite chalks, and glitter are incorporated as needed to provide nuance.

Adopting a trial and error approach, my process unfolds with a deliberate yet restless inquiry, yielding forms with a transient quality that reflects the nature of my exploration. I place considerable emphasis on both material craftsmanship and the refinement of my methodology, connecting substance and approach.

The significance of beauty in my work resonates deeply with me and asserts my vision in a world often inclined towards conformity. Preferring innovation over the mastery of technique, I intentionally break free from conventional norms, embracing artistic and self-autonomy as a means of refining my perspective.

Compositionally, the interplay between lines and negative space generates a rhythmic tension and adds to the complexity of my visual narrative. I look for the relationships between disparate elements, harmonizing contradictory shapes and volumes into a cohesive whole, inviting interpretation and dialogue.

Blending my cultural influences with who I am today has catalyzed my self-determination and empowered me. My purpose is not only to express visual narratives but also to contribute to the broader conversation surrounding the profound complexity of human ingenuity and beautyI identify as a South African American artist.  My work is a visual exploration of aesthetics, cultural amalgamation, and traditions. From my upbringing, I find profound inspiration in the cultural aesthetics that nurtured me during my formative years, influencing the nuanced way in which I process and articulate my thoughts.

My artistic focus is connected to the interplay between identity, history, and shared encounters—a narrative of self-determination that has evolved from the broader context of my childhood. I am intrigued with aesthetic fusion stemming from cultural osmosis. I view the development of expression as an opportunity to embrace both individualism and the collective self.

Seeking to contribute to a broader discourse on the intricacies of human ingenuity, I navigate familiar influences through innovation. My chosen mediums—wire, raffia, string, paint, and cardboard—are selected for their malleability, while additional elements like gouache, acrylic paint, graphite chalks, and glitter are incorporated as needed to provide nuance.

Adopting a trial-and-error approach, my process unfolds with a deliberate yet restless inquiry, yielding forms with a transient quality that reflects the nature of my exploration. I place considerable emphasis on both material craftsmanship and the refinement of my methodology, connecting substance and approach.

The significance of beauty in my work resonates deeply with me and asserts my vision in a world often inclined towards conformity. Preferring innovation over the mastery of technique, I intentionally break free from conventional norms, embracing artistic and self-autonomy as a means of refining my perspective.

Compositionally, the interplay between lines and negative space generates a rhythmic tension and adds to the complexity of my visual narrative. I look for the relationships between disparate elements, harmonizing contradictory shapes and volumes into a cohesive whole, inviting nterpretation and dialogue.

Blending my cultural influences with who I am today has catalyzed my self-determination and empowered me. My purpose is not only to express visual narratives but also to contribute to the broader conversation surrounding the profound complexity of human ingenuity and beauty.

Carrying the Dreamer Essay by A. M. Weaver

Carrying the Dreamer Essay by A. M. Weaver

A. M. Weaver is an independent curator and art journalist, who frequently writes for Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Artvoices and Surface Design. She currently lives in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Immersed in abstraction for over two decades, Michelle Marcuse sashays from depictions of mass to ethereal linear patterns in her recent body of work, Carrying the Dreamer, pertaining to dreams and loosely rendered remembrances. Having grown up in South Africa, she recalls playing unsupervised in the suburbs of Cape Town, located on the shore of Table Mountain, amongst two and a half acres of Chestnut trees, garden groves, Goose Berries, Loquats and Birds of Paradise. With her brother as her constant companion, Marcuse’s world was full of creative play. There was no television in the Marcuse household, so she and her brother constructed elaborate tales that they enacted with enthusiasm and aplomb. They ate the blooms from the garden and buried themselves in leaves during the autumn, constructing make-believe worlds from the foliage. Theirs was an idyllic childhood, but the ever presence of apartheid loomed in the background. A sensitive child, Marcuse explains that even in the midst of such youthful bliss, the world around her was full of angst and sorrow. In revisiting aspects of the period through her most recent series, she comes to grips with a future that resembles a post-apocalypse universe—a floating world that belies gravitational pull, with objects, sky, clouds, partially architectural rendered structures and natural growth no longer anchored. Her aesthetic shares much in common with that of William Kentridge, whose agenda has political satire and critique at its root.

Both of these South African artists share a Jewish ancestry and exude intensity in their dramatic use of materials, charcoal in the case of Kentridge and black ink by Marcuse. While Kentridge merges depictions of figures, rooms and cityscapes with absurdity, conjuring an apocalyptic reality, Marcuse chooses the path of illusionistic abstract dreamscapes. Both construct brooding narratives in which the use of black lines and marks create melancholy existential atmospheres. Kentridge who actually lived through South Africa’s transition from white rule to indigenous leadership, chooses to focus on the anxiety and conflicting sense of self fostered by post colonialism and the aftermath of apartheid. On the other hand, Marcuse revisits her dream world in an attempt to navigate through the perception of the utopian reality, gleaned in her youth, with an emotional awareness of its dystopia. At the age of ten, Marcuse had a prophetic dream in which a catastrophic event colored everything in a hush of grayness, revealing a floating universe of both animate and inanimate objects that defied the laws of gravity.

Since 2008, Marcuse endeavored to capture the immense revelation of this unconscious state. In Carrying the Dreamer, she reaches into her past and half-remembered dreams to create a hauntingly beautiful series. Particular to the effects of using sheets of silver alloy attached to a variety of thin Japanese papers, she sets the stage for works that appear aged and fragile, alluding to narratives steeped in a Kafkaesque maze. Adeptly using a wide range of rapidograph pens with black ink and gouache, she fashions buoyant worlds of part organic and mechanical forms. Carefully placed within the compositions, these meticulously drawn forms— spiraling and elongated tentacles cascading from bulbous and stacked shapes--dangle in open space or hover above architectonic structures. At a distance they appear to be recognizable images, but upon closer scrutiny, they are illusionistic aerial abstractions. Her marks, archaic and delicate, are reminiscent of Leonardo Di Vinci’s drawings of his inventions. Whether diaphanous, gliding or fixed, her illusionary creations are worlds within worlds that soar and float like notations on the page.

Province of Corruption, 2011, is loosely based on the writings of Michael Ondaatje. Marcuse loves his use of language and sentence constructs: “. . . So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like the section of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from the mural at night.” This passage from The English Patient seems to be an appropriate quote in reference to Marcuse’s drawings. The relationship is almost literal; Marcuse’s works on paper possess an array of fragments, pieces conspicuously missing; we are left with mere vicissitudes of conjured dream states. A construction reminiscent of a sleigh appears repeatedly, and symbolic of life’s journey and survival, emblems of a sole figure in a rowboat glide along the parameters of many works. These and ethereal cloud like forms manifest as spirits and/or angels.

In The Anonymous Giver, 2012, a central form looms large in comparison to other elements, which Marcuse refers to as a force, perhaps an Archangel. Compositionally, the vantage point is like a bird’s-eye view, fluttering above a landscape that portends a futuristic reality. Although not religious, she acknowledges a supreme power that oversees and is responsible for the order of things. Concerned with the dichotomy of dark and light, she often views her works under diverse lighting conditions; thus, discovering shimmers of light that intersect her drawings of water mass, bridges and dwellings cloaked in shadow. Her renditions of what appear to be cities in works such as Exposed Entirely and Leading Somewhere, 2013, are mysterious and foreboding and seem to address an era yet to come. We grew up believing in modern utopias, yet Marcuse presages an imminent future, one replete with flotsam as well as a quest for spirituality that has endured, since the beginning of mankind. The aspiration is heaven bound.

3 Artists, Many Stories – The 39th Annual Wind Challenge Art Exhibition

3 Artists, Many Stories – The 39th Annual Wind Challenge Art Exhibition

By A.M. Weaver
September 28, 2016

Now in its 39th year, Fleisher Art Memorial's Wind Challenge exhibition series is still going strong. A.M. Weaver reviews this year's offerings. – Artblog Editor

The works of emerging/mid career artists Amber Johnston, Brian Richmond, and Michelle Marcuse in the current Wind Challenge Exhibition at the Fleisher Art Memorial represent a small sampling by these notable Philadelphia artists. But a sense of their chosen direction is evident. This may not be the strongest Challenge show ever, taking into consideration it is the 39th year, but there is much fodder for discussion and at the opening the air was buzzing with questions and commentary about these three distinct personal narratives.

Found objects, childhood memories

Having found her voice as a sculptor–after many years of working in encaustic painting–Michelle Marcuse builds on a modernist paradigm of the found object, while hedging on global issues of repurposing and recycling materials. In her case, she makes use of discarded cardboard.

The artist revealed during her artist talk at the exhibit’s opening reception that her early childhood memories were source material for the drawings and three sculptures on display. The structures, seen in the round and suspended on the wall made exclusively of cardboard, are crudely constructed, alluding to the source of her inspiration–Johannesburg shantytowns. The artist intimated that as a child she felt like a voyeur into a world she did not completely understand. Now, the images of these towns loom large in Marcuse’s psyche and represent the inequity of existence in apartheid South Africa that separated whites, blacks, and coloreds. After a gestation period of decades, Marcuse in her past and current work traverses psychoanalytic landscapes of dreams and memories.

As a mature artist, Marcuse plays with formal elements of composition; however, she seems to invite close scrutiny of the rough-hewn quality of the construction, even emphasizing that aspect. On viewing Marcuse’s “Signs of Compromise” (2016), these two art world masterworks come to mind: Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-1923) and Vladimir Tatlin’s tower, “Monument to the Third International” (1920). To say Marcuse’s work hearkens back to another era is not a bad thing–after all, these are titans in the annals of art history. She has found a material that transcends its humble origin in an attempt to create works that are substantial and nuanced and that move toward the monumental. Marcuse is definitely onto something that greatly expands her visual vocabulary!

A great experiment, the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial has for 118 years promoted making art accessible for all regardless of class, economic means, or artistic acumen. The Wind Challenge Exhibition, in its 39th year, is off to a grand start with the current iteration of the administration under the leadership of Elizabeth Grimaldi. However, let’s not forget the innumerable artists who have graced the walls of the Fleisher Art Memorial, from Bo Bartlett to Virgil Marti, who have continued to make exceptional art. Johnston, Richmond, and Marcuse join an illustrious group of artists who have contributed to Philadelphia’s cultural history.

As By Digging at Painted Bride

As By Digging at Painted Bride, three artists delve into time, history, and the human psyche

By Chip Schwartz
December 27, 2017

Chip reviews the InLiquid show, "As By Digging," at Painted Bride, with three artists whose work digs for emotional truth in personal and other human histories.

At the Painted Bride Art Center’s gallery space, in an InLiquid show curated by Scott Schultheis,

Remembered shantytown architecture of Michelle Marcuse

Michelle Marcuse provides an unmistakably architectural foundation for her creative experiments as she affixes bits of cardboard together to form tiny huts and hovels splashed here and there with subtle streaks of white paint. While the corrugated forms inherent in the original cardboard material, paired with Marcuse’s construction techniques, allude to materials like vinyl siding or sheets of corrugated steel, almost everything used is a repurposed paper product with a wood pulp origin. It is no surprise, then, that these glued-together, reconstituted pulp sculptures mostly resemble treehouses or shanties also built primarily out of wood. Marcuse seems to draw parallels between consumer and industrial waste, much of which comes into and then swiftly leaves our lives, ushered between locations that are largely out of view of the average person.

The complicated tangles of fragments that Marcuse utilizes for her tiny structures indicate a pattern of organic, haphazard growth over time, sifted from some sort of convoluted, hidden past. However nothing about history or science is as cut and dry as it appears in its polished, publicized form. Indeed, building a historical narrative, or fitting together facts to see a bigger picture is often a messy and arduous journey with as many twists and turns as those built into this artist’s perplexing array of hallways, columns, and stairs.