Marianna Simnett

Seventeen opens its New York gallery with the first US solo exhibition by British artist Marianna Simnett.

The exhibition is comprised of two works: a new 15 minute video, The Needle and the Larynx (2016) and a large-scale installation, Faint with Light (2016). Faint with Light occupies the pitch-black main room and confronts the viewer with a 17ft wall of fierce, sterile lights. The accompanying audio is a recording of the artist repeatedly and deliberately fainting through persistent hyperventilation. As the rhythm and intensity of breathing increases so does the rise and fall of lights. In the moment of the artist's blackout, the room is filled with an intense brightness, accompanied by the choked, unconscious groan of air leaving her body.

In The Needle and the Larynx the artist recounts a cautionary tale to the viewer. Adopting the theatricality and menace of a dark children's fable, written in rhyme and breaking into song, the story places the central character, The Girl, at odds with a medical professional. Having initially dismissed her requests for a surgical intervention, The Surgeon is forced to accede to The Girl's demand. The story unfolds over slowed footage of the artist having her voice surgically lowered. Oscillating between digital and surgical voice manipulation, the fable is then related in the artist's (The Girl's) newly descended tones.

Protagonists such as these are found regularly within Simnett's films - an authoritarian surgeon and a young girl in a grim tale, and throughout her work the location and contested site is the body. In this case the bodies of the surgeon and the girl are left altered. In other films, cockroaches are modified in laboratories, the artist's varicose veins are ruptured, udders are infected by mastitis. These scenarios allow discussions of the body to be placed at the centre of Simnett's practice, in stories where female character traits may be seen by Western medicine as illness and requiring active treatment.

While subjecting her own body to operations and punishing performance, the viewer's body is also implicated. A trained musician, Simnett uses the emotive capacity of music and sound to engage the viewer. Works are not so much viewed as felt, with the senses beguiled and then vitally overwhelmed. The graphic depiction of a needle entering the skin in this new film makes the parable distressingly real and one is assailed by the violence and physicality of Faint with Light.

Marianna Simnett is an artist based in London, UK. Her work spans video, performance, installation and drawing, with a focus on bodies and their limits. She was a winner of the Jerwood / FVU Award in 2015 and produced a video trilogy, The Udder, Blood and Blue Roses between 2014-15. She had her first solo show with Seventeen in January 2016 and in November this year inaugurates Seventeen's New York gallery. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Matt's Gallery, London and is working on a new musical film to be produced by Film and Video Umbrella.