Jenine Marsh

Ashley Berlin is proud to present an exhibition by Canadian artist Jenine Marsh, curated by Angel Callandar.

Jenine Marsh’s sculptural practice portrays the shared experience of end-stage capitalism. Using elements of the everyday such as coins, flowers, newspaper, and purses mixed with materials that signify the labour of the built environment like concrete and bronze, Marsh highlights how economic, social, and architectural realities are tightly bound to each other. With a distinct interest in historical and literary conceptions of utopia, her recent work shows an equal consideration for the past as for the future. An overview of her artistic work reveals a poetic, cohesive feminist and anti-capitalist insight into value, agency, and mortality, evaluated through processes of research, physical contact, and personal resistance.

In this new solo exhibition, Resurrected in Times of Need, Marsh creates a site-specific installation that addresses systems of value and memorialization, particularly related to the history of Berlin. Looking closely at the relief sculptures at the Treptower Park Soviet Memorial, the graphic figuration of a strong, idealized proletariat is shot through with the elements of Marsh’s material sensibilities. Disembodied and sculpted in the familiar, civic medium of concrete, the forms disclose the urgency and inadequacy of their material. As the show’s title suggests, despair, optimism, nostalgia, and forgetting are cyclical parts of the collective unconscious, while March’s sculptural process mirrors historical materialism where the past, present, and future may become tactile and interactive.

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary AB Canada) uses sculpture and installation to explore themes of agency, mortality and value. Coins, as well as other paraphernalia of exchange and contact, such as purses and flowers, and fragmented casts of hands or feet, are manipulated and misused. Through serialized processes of destruction and transformation, her works cultivate illicit and intimate responses to the shared conditions of end-stage capitalism. Marsh’s work has been exhibited at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Prairie, Chicago (2024); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2023); Joe Project, Montreal (2023), Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2023); Union Pacific, London (2023); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Essex Flowers, New York (2020); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019), OSL Contemporary, Oslo (2019); Entrée Gallery (2018), and Lulu, Mexico City (2015). She has served as artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2009, 2010 and 2022), at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet, Bergen (2018); and Rupert, Vilnius (2017). Marsh lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Angel Callander is a writer, editor, and curator in Toronto. She holds an MA in Art History and Visual Culture (translation) from the Humboldt University of Berlin (2018). Her work takes a historical materialist approach to art through themes such as labour, technology, feminism, structures of power, and the culture industry. Her writing can be found in publications such as CBC Arts, C Magazine, Esse arts + opinions, BlackFlash, and Canadian Art among others. She has also contributed essays to the anthologies Imagining Futures of Experimental Media (Pleasure Dome, NIMAC & OddSite Arts, 2023), Architecture and the Smart City (Routledge, 2019), and Interface Critique (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016).