Marian Tubbs

Melting, burning + decaying on the blistering surface of a nuclear sun with the Apocalypse Summer group show in LA

28 July 2017

The Apocalypse Summer group exhibition is on at ltd los angeles, opening July 29 and running to September 9.

Featuring work by Hayden Dunham, Dominic SamsworthLila de Magalhaes, Marian Tubbs and more, the theme of the show follows contemporary anxieties over climate change and capitalist destruction in a short introductory text that follows the mutant realities of imminent human catastrophe:

“Our hallucinations worsen with each passing day of blinding sun, no UV can save us from the banal fate of eating sunscreen by the bucket in a futile attempt to survive life on earth’s blistering surface.”

Other artists involved include Aimee Goguen, Lucas Ajemian, Andrea Marie Breiling, Ross Caliendo, Ian Davis, Anton Lieberman, Jake Longstreth, Chandler McWilliams and Alice Wang.

See the lts los angeles website for details.**

 

Install view of #HaydenDunham at ‘Last’ group exhib #ACP, running to Mar 23.

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Abstract Sex* @ Hessel Museum, May 8 – 29

6 May 2016

The Abstract Sex* group exhibition is on at New York’s the Hessel Museum of Art at Center for Curatorial Studies (CSS Bard), Bard College, opening May 8 and running to May 29.

Curated by Dana Kopel, the show features Juliette Bonneviot, Jesse Darling, Dorota Gaweda, Egle Kulbokaite, and Marian Tubbs and aims to reconceptualize “sex in the biopolitical regime”, going beyond the veneer of a coherent body or self within an organic model of a society.

The title is inspired by Goldsmiths digital media theorist Luciana Parisi’s rethinking of notions of sex and gender on biological and cultural terms and posits a “post-sex adequate to a radically expanded conception of what it is to be human”.

See the Abstract Sex*  website for details.**

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Quake II @ Arcadia Missa reviewed

9 December 2014

“I like an exhibition that reads as a first person shooter”, says the press release for Quake II, curated by Holly Childs, running at London’s Arcadia Missa and featuring the work of two Australian-based artists Marian Tubbs and André Piguet. Taking its name from the 1997 video game, which in turn takes its title from the 1996 original, Quake, the show was conceived as a “non-linear curve” against  Childs’ upcoming book Danklands, published by the aforementioned London gallery and launching across Europe and Australia through mid-December.

The exhibition very much reads as an interactive video game. Boarded off from the outside by white exhibition walling, there’s a window smashed through the panelling and supporting pinewood frames with a view inside that’s blocked by the back of Tubbs’ ‘untitled (the sea)’ (2014) video. It’s part of the artist’s ‘New Hunger‘ installation, featuring among other things a person-sized makeshift doorway where on walking through manouverability is key.

Quake II @ Arcadia Missa. Installation view. Courtesy Marian Tubbs.
Quake II @ Arcadia Missa. Installation view. Courtesy Marian Tubbs.

That’s especially true at an exhibition opening where the gallery floor is not only littered with Piguet’s lego trees, a mug, a red and white-dotted ceramic mushroom and a glazed and raw clay candle holder, but is also crowded with human bodies. At the centre of this single work installation scattered around the room, ‘WET_TIP_HEN_ax (blk lgn pale edit) Feat. SLCT troll garden garb’ (2014) lists “pigment”, “small amounts of gallium” and the presumably made up word of “tetrahydrosmaugs” as its materials, while a cloudy, semi-transparent battle-axe made from resin hangs in its centre. It’s fluoro axe-head equivalent is lying on the floor in a corner.

Tubbs’ dazzling stews of synthetic colour drift across loosely hung fabric limping from and falling out of wall-hung frames, a ribbon of motionless-but-abstractly-moving material tumbles down from ceiling to floor. “Feminist repurpose video #gamergate subversion shit” says the press release, as one considers the video raining Emojii and immaterial images of torn out fragments of words in ‘untitled (the sea)’. It’s at eye level and blocking the hole in the gallery wall, while announcing, “It’s hard for girls”. On the floor in the corner, ‘Vulgar Latin‘ (2014) projects screenshots of a YouTube window with a view into industrial sludge that’s suspended in time, floating across space. The soundtrack travels from pensive piano to crackling and crunching synth lines that slice across 2D gradient rectangles giving the illusion of 3D cylinders. Sometimes they bounce back from, other times bouncing out of, its frame. Bit coins. Coinye. Spilt milk. A wavy strip of snakeskin.

In announcing an interest in content that “reroutes its form” at the final Lunch Bytes in London before reading Augustine’s “make-up tutorial that is also subliminally a climate change awareness campaign, or a self-defence for women pep talk”, excerpted from Danklands, Childs expanded on an interest in physical space mediated by the online, in a Google Maps still of the Melbourne Docklands where it’s secret Control Pond Q is hidden from virtual view. In Quake II, Childs, Tubbs and Piguet present the spill over from the realm of the video game to the gallery floor in the implicit culture war of an exhibition that for once makes the Invisible Wall visible. **

Exhibition photos, top-right.

Holly Childs’ Danklands, launches in London on Dec 9, Berlin on Dec 11, Melbourne on Dec 16 and Sydney on Dec 18. Quake II is on at Arcadia Missa, running from November 28 to December 12, 2014.

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