Marina Font
Bio
Marina Font was born in Argentina. She currently lives in Miami Beach, and works at her studio at The Collective 62, located in Liberty City, Miami. Marina studied design at the Martin Malharro School of Visual Arts, Mar del Plata, Argentina. In 1998 she traveled to France to study Photography at the Speos Ecole de la Photographie, Paris. She earned a MFA in Photography from Barry University, Miami in 2009. Since then she has exhibited extensively at galleries, museums and cultural institution in the US and abroad and her work is present in various public and private collections throughout the world.
She is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, mixed media, installation and video. Her studio practice explores ideas about identity, gender, territory, language, memory and the forces of the unconscious. Her visceral and intuitive works, strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, often focuses on women and the domestic sphere. Marina is also part of the multidisciplinary collaborative RPM Projects.
Statement
The starting point for this new series of works – made while in quarantine – is a familial one, one that deals with a formal connection to the physicality of each of the empty, sun-bleached, pages of a recovered photo album I inherited from my grandmother. The salvaged album held almost no testimony of the life that it was supposed to carry. My process has been to re-imagine and re-build new narratives upon what was left.
Departing from that specific album, I have photographed each of its pages and repurposed the resulting single images as a “canvas” to later intervene them with materials that are traditionally used in family albums: photo-corners, vellum and glassine, as well as recycled album pages, photo-sleeves, gold-leaf, thread, and paint.
For this series, I elicit and question the empty space – the notion of ‘what remains’ – of the physical photo album, while playfully exploring the numerous possibilities of unkempt recollections in which the absent memories become abstractions. As new technologies claim to aid us in preserving our memories, I reflect on the progressive shift of vernacular photography and the disappearance of the family album as we have known it. These works reflect upon how memory is built through the subjective hand of the album-maker, choosing to edit the continuity of our timelines and therefore altering the narrative for subsequent generations.
Shifted Narratives, Ciconia Edition: 100 Iterations…
“In these works, a single photograph is used over and over as a starting point, the space from which an instinctive response to the image serves as a memory-tracing territory…
