Lynne Marsh

Taking Positions, Lynne Marsh’s first solo show at Tintype, presents a set of three performance-based video sculptures. Marsh draws together a potent combination of conceptual and aesthetic threads around figuration and abstraction; sculpture, the female body, and performance.

Taking Positions began with an invitation for Marsh to film in the space of Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, formerly the atelier of Arno Breker — an official state sculptor of the Third Reich. As with Marsh’s previous works such as Stadium, she engages with specific sites and architectures that bear a conflation of historical, social, and political forces.

In the lead-up to Kunsthaus Dahlem’s inauguration as a new exhibition venue, Lynne Marsh worked with six female performers, filming them in the space as they embodied the postures of six of Breker’s sculptures. She chose works representing idealised femininity through such mythological figures as Eos, Psyche and Humility.

These short films form the basis of Taking Positions; Marsh presents them at Tintype on specially designed plinths, embedding moving image in a sculptural mise-en-scène. The work activates a tension between the live and the fixed, present and past, the female body as sculpture and human bodies in the here and now. Marsh questions whether a gesture or a posture can hold an ideology and to what extent it may be re-performed, possessed or repurposed.

Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist, currently living and working in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Concordia University in Montreal and her MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2001 – 2016 she lived and worked in both London and Berlin.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented by Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2017); Opera North, Leeds (2016); fig-2 at ICA, London (2015); Scrap Metal, in association with the Toronto International Film Festival (2014); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2008). Her work has also been featured at La Biennale de Montréal (2014); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou (2011); Manif d’art–The Québec City Biennial (2010); and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007).

Lynne Marsh’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University; and Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.