| Description |
Marianne Vitale’s multi-disciplinary practice combines sculpture, film and video, theatre and drawing. Cultivating a considered aesthetic of absurdity, her work often functions as parody of cultural production, broaching a wide array of subjects in an attempt to escape classification. Wood beams, posts and boards taken from the floors, walls and ceilings of old factories and warehouses throughout New York– is sourced from scrap yards and reconfigured into sculptural replicas of objects and structures reminiscent of its historical origins. With the help of historical imagery, outhouses, false fronts, barns, jail cells and other architectural elements of America’s Old West are reconstructed with traditional, often long abandoned techniques. The reclaimed lumber, once primary building material and a lynchpin in the country’s industrialization, is left untreated and shows the remains of a hundredplus years of wear and tear. With its weathering, dirt, markings, footprints and rusty nails, it serves as signifier of authenticity to the country’s mythologized past and helps to turn these objects into nostalgic and lonely monuments to that long-gone and overly glorified pre-modern era in its’ annals.
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