Monoliths, looking at existential constants. 2013 – ongoing, size noted by each work. The images are often human body scale to engage the physicality of the viewer. The body of work takes from science and science-fiction to consider time, space, form, and the elements. The nature of desire and ways post-modernism served as a reaction to modernity motivated these artworks.
On the spectrum of ideological movements: are pursuits for transcending existence, expressed as self-erasure, escape, and revolutionary faiths sustainable and good for life?
Studying the history of ideas became complicated in a global context, based on cultural appropriation and repetitive uses of hacking individuals through ideas, economics, social policy, biology, social media, and the reformation of age old patterns of control through re-imagined promises. The formation of the Eurasian concept can be considered a form of fascism.
Heidegger’s popularity in certain academic forums came starkly up against the tutelage of my ancestor Ellen Ammann who worked for the rights of women, families, and freedom in faith. Therefore, these works are intended to serve as formal explorations of both ideas and objective reality, and not buttress propaganda. The forms of water and terrain are used to create visceral imagery, engaging viewers in the simultaneous experience of subjectivity and objectivity.
One of my personal theories is that humans can feel the differences between something in accordance with life and that which is against life. However, such axioms are difficult to fully understand until absolute clarity is achieved, often through suffering. The dark forms of fascism and tyranny continue to haunt civilisation through new frameworks of thought (ideological stews).
In the tradition of studying an idea through to its end, a difficult task taken up and continued seriously by American conceptual artists, the use of a speculative approach transformed ideological research into “word art,” described by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word. The pursuit of a wordless art forms that register with minimal use of Sign or Value is used as a means to relate to as many viewers as possible through an empirical experience, within privileged safety of an art setting and through the shift of the viewing field to increasingly virtual and screen based formats.
The aesthetic relationships appear at first glance as mirroring, and with longer-looking nuanced differences. This type of, individuation is engaged by the scale of the prints demanding the viewers, confrontation with projection based on ideology and what is obvious in the reality viewing field.
Titles: Neoplatonic, Memoria Technika (5 images), Capsula: Young Lovers, Capsula: Cistern, Levetiden, Pellucid, Tabes, Currere I, Currere II, Concatenate I, Concatenate II, Esker, Luna Cascade, Anaphora, Omniscient, Under the Sun, 30 seconds of Lake Michigan, Melodi, Undulasjon. Monoliths developed into Virtual Material. Artworks contain the intention to become public art installation and can be made onto a variety of materials including paper, cement, metal, vinyl, mosaic and textile. Contact mariammanart@icloud.com for custom size and exhibition inquiries.
NEOPLATONIC, 2018, Film exposures digitally joined. Limited Edition of 25: 50 x 35 cm. Limited edition of 8: 70 cm x 45 cm.
CAPSULA: YOUNG LOVERS, 2017, Film exposures arranged as a horizontal monolith.
MEMORIA TECHNICA, 2015 – 2017, a series of 5 monolithic images, sizes vary, recent exhibition of the monoliths measured 90,64 x 180 cm ( 35,68 x 70,87 in ), Film exposures realized as seasons, axiomatically marking the vertical landscape in relationship with the human body in magnetic resonance imaging. Reflected and refracted rays form a curvature filled and hollowed by literary translation of tactile qualities associated with the four seasons. The monolith as markers in chronoception – the sense and perception of passage through time. These monoliths are part of the Virtual Material works.
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CAPSULA: CISTERNS, 2017, Film exposures arranged as a horizontal monolith. Photography and subjectivity are seemingly inseparable, and the question of using the image as a document or proof of interior experiences contains slippages drawing lines between narratives and proof. In this particular monolithic strip, the eye confronts dark spaces and strips, the absences as frames around references. The darkened environment contains moss, a staircase, Japanese style bridge, stone arches, and affective tonal lighting. The psychological place viewed within the subterranean horizon involves an experience of a maze, not of wonder, but of gamification. The technological tones, repetition of scenes, points to the place being made by an architect, not of the viewers making. A trap could be revealed with more light. Seeing through the dark, the imprisoned viewer becomes acutely aware, either hypersensitive to details or dulled by the trap of gaze. The monolith reveals the way spectators in the world become subjected to psychological games structural builders create. The routes of egress also predetermined. The images were made in the @cisternerne in Copenhagen, Denmark, from the Sambuchi installation.
LEVETIDEN & PELLUCID, 2017, photography, I am moving all day and not moving at all. I am like the moon underneath the waves that ever go rolling. – Anonymous
TABES, 2017, Four Film exposures digitally joined. The analogue photographs were digitally assembled forming a visual impression of an emaciating pathos. Often referenced to sexual transmission, diseases of waste infect the auras, minds, and behaviors of cultural regression. Therefore, the abstractions invoke awareness within each viewer, something unique to each person’s life.
CURRERE I, II, III 2016, Film exposures digitally merged as a monolith. Limited Edition of 25: 35 x 50 cm (14 x 20 in) Limited Edition of 8: 44 x 70 cm (43.7 x 59.5 in)
ESKER, 2016, Film exposures digitally joined, Edition of 25: 37.6 x 50.8 cm ( 14.8 x 20 in ), Edition of 8: 74.9 x 101.2 cm (29.5 x 39.83 in) The artwork can be printed on various art papers, etched in glass, sublimation printed on textile or woven in fabric.
CONCATENATE I, II, 2016, Film exposures digitally joined. Looking at patterns in nature through the lends of geological time, so as to avoid the confrontational hubris of narrative writing. Two separate frames are merged together, as a means to rejoin separate frames as a continual flow.
LUNA CASCADE, 2016, Film exposures digitally joined, Edition of 25: 37.6 x 50.8 cm ( 14.8 x 20 in ), Edition of 8: 74.9 x 101.2 cm ( 29.5 x 39.83 in ) The artwork can be printed on various art papers, etched in glass, sublimation printed on textile or woven in fabric.
ANAPHORA, 2015, film images printed on single surface, 103,91 x 84,79cm (40,91 x 33,38in).
OMNISCIENT, 2015, 101.6cm x 304.8cm (40 x 120 in), monolithic image and text: A monument of future history. The image stands as a totem for the change in social structure toward the wisdom of water. Water emerges as the discourse for the emotional body. The emotional body serving as the pathway for the wisdom of intuition. In the new world, emotional suppression as poverty and polluted waters cease through the cleansing of pain into ecstatic expression. Responsibility for water comes through the reverence of its high wisdom. Sacred in the new society, water is respected, protected, cherished and shared freely among people to create humane societies upon all lands. A reverence for water solidifies the respect and preservation of the emotional body constituting a humane society for humans to exist in. This work was awarded 1st place by the jury in the Imaging New Eurasia Exhibition in Gwangju, South Korea.
UNDER THE SUN, 2015, 5 image panel, overall size 215 x 71 cm (85 x 28 in), Film exposures arranged as a horizontal monolith, looking at senses of perception on the notion of passage through time. Portrait oriented images of a blank journal are marked by the sun casting variations of shadow form. The positive and negative spaces of the image create a sense of turning movement within the viewer evoking the memory of our perpetual revolutions in the simultaneity of the stories written and to be written pivoting on the framing of one’s perspective. In this way, the writing of the sun is performed as a shadow by the pend. The images serve also as sketches for sculptures.
30SECONDS OF LAKE MICHIGAN, 2015, triptych, images on acrylic panel, overall size 215 x 71 cm (85 x 28 in), Film exposures arranged as film. The horizon shifts to create the sense the viewer is standing on boat. This is one of the artworks close to the immediacy of presence in the temporal qualities of lived experience and memory. When mounted in space or on a wall, light passes through the images and create a shadow of the plane behind the image. 30seconds of Lake Michigan focuses on the nature of time, being, and becoming. As photography seeks to represent a moment frozen in time, the nearly frozen lake ebbs and flows. Each frame of film exposed was from a different wave, reconstructed back together as a film strip and mounted as a triptych on clear acrylic. In the way that the field of vision is transparent and direct, the printed images on thin acrylic represent a narrative of the water itself. The state of flow invites viewers to slow down into breathing, witnessing as suggested 30seconds of inhaling and exhaling with the water all at once. The collapse and joining of space and time merge the processes of being and becoming with the goal of transcendence.
MELODI, 2014, 5 image panel, overall size 215 x 71 cm (85 x 28 in), Film exposures arranged as film strip. Snow, ice, water, sand, in wintertime when nature ripens and matures. The cadence of the images reflects the photographic process with the focus on the planar aspect in forming relationships with depth and time. The surface contains multitudes of aggregates in various forms that in their being recall the endless transition and change through ebbs and flows, pulling this way and that on the eternal stillness.
UNDULASJON, 2014, diptych, Film exposures, 104 x 85 cm (40.9 x 33.4 in) Accumulated layers of frozen water exposed on film and arranged into a formal diptych. The work is one in the ongoing series: Monoliths. The artwork can be printed on various art papers, etched in glass, sublimation printed on textile or woven in fabric. Contact the artist for custom size and exhibition inquiries. Life shows those who are willing to look and find understanding through following the call of curiosity to be answered.
Decades long curiosity with the monolith as a symbol, object, animistic, pragmatic and esoteric functions, the comment on the Montparnasse structure in Paris summarized what the monolith is: the disappearance of the self through observation of all that surrounds. “The observation deck of Tour Maine-Montparnasse enjoys the most beautiful view in all of Paris because it is the only place from which the tower itself cannot be seen.” In other words, upon and within existence, we have a view out that forgets that we are. – 2023
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