Conversations in Contemporary Art presents Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins

"For all their play, Marman and Borins are ultimately dealing with transparency and opacity, and the endless tools modernity has given us to mechanize and dehumanize in the service of deflecting truth and accountability." - Murray Whyte

Biography

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have practiced sculpture, installation and media art in Toronto since 2000. Jennifer Marman is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. Daniel Borins is a graduate of McGill University. Both Marman and Borins are also graduates of the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001 - where they first met and began collaborating together.

Recent examples of the artists' work abound in the museum and public spheres. In the fall of 2008 Marman and Borins participated in a group sculpture show at the National Gallery of Canada entitled Caught in the Act. In 2009 Marman and Borins completed a commission for a large-scale interactive work for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Business. One of their upcoming public projects includes a sculpture commission for Downsview Subway Station received from the Toronto Transit Commission.

In the fall of 2013, they had their first solo show at Tierney Gardarin Gallery in New York. Recently their work has been exhibited at Galeria OMR, Mexico City and James Cohan Gallery, New York.  From 2013 on, their solo exhibition produced by the art Gallery of Hamilton and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery has been on tour. This exhibition will continue through to the Art Gallery of Southern Alberta, Art Gallery of Windsor and other institutions.

Artist Statement

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have been making large-format sculpture, mixed media, installation and electronic art since 2000. Intervening upon institutional and public spaces, their work often contextualizes visual art squarely within everyday life while simultaneously referring to and reassessing twentieth century art history: its utopias, polemics, and formal one-upmanship. Concurrently, their work discusses contemporary museum modalities within the context of ideological stances compromised by globalized market forces. In doing so, Marman and Borins expose the tensions arising between the historicity, formalism and politicization of the artwork to produce new meanings from them.

Marman and Borins express these concepts not only through art historical references, but also through popular design strategies and industrial-based materials. Their works' aesthetics and style, often conflate mass communications with references that deconstruct the history of ideological movements in twentieth century art. Marman and Borins also pursue a strategy of formal mutability, in which they define form by subject matter rather than by self-expression. This mutability illustrates the problem the artists have with contemporary visual art and meaning-making: the art world cannot keep up with the pace of the world, and the contemporary artist is then a minor grammarian in a sea of visual culture. In turn, the artists posit strategies of visual resistance. They use paradox and authorial de-centering to mirror a homogeneous political landscape in an attempt to resist the ubiquity that overshadows all critique of it. They achieve this through such strategies as pairing styles of post-minimalism and electronic art, and by means of high-art formalism and abstraction, transliterated into popular aesthetics. Marman and Borins often express these ideas with ironical, cynical humour and attendant ambiguity. It is, indeed, a formidable challenge to perform all of this deftly within a coherent chain of paradoxical stances, but it is this very challenge that drives the artists to push their inquiries further.

Additional information

When: Thursday, January 16, 6:00 p.m.

Where: VA Building, Room 114, 1395 René Lévesque West

Admission for all Conversations in Contemporary Art events is FREE and open to the general public.
Seating is first come, first serve.  Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

The lectures will be held in English.