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Marietta Davis is a New York-based artist.
I’m a New York-based artist working in video and photography. I started my studies at Marymount Manhattan in film and video, and transferred to the School of Visual Arts to focus on photography, without abandoning my interest in film. I started with black-and-white photography that I often ended up hand coloring and so eventually switched to color, which I continue to work in today. Influenced by Julia Margaret Cameron and Cindy Sherman, I created photographs that were more theatrical and included props, costumes, and sets. I then turned the camera on myself as a way to re-examine the stereotypical myths of feminine identity, ideal beauty, behavior, and body politics throughout history. My self-portraits satirize the absurdity and superficiality of standard female representations by inserting myself into a variety of roles. I am a time-traveling poseur, with a sense of humor.
Self-portraiture is an individual and personal process and although it was my primary focus, I have expanded my practice through collaborations with other artists. After graduating, in 1995, I started working on a Public Access variety show, Minted Melon Cubed 180, with painter Steven Baines, and multimedia and performance artist Delia Gonzales. This thematic variety show consisted of interviews and showcased the work of a wide range of artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and performers. The format of the show further developed the theatrical content of my creative output. I also found the collaborative process to be very rewarding and it has remained a key component in my work.
At the same time, I started collaborating. I started color printing for art, fashion, and commercial photographers to support myself. I believe that has influenced my work as much as art, the media, films, and fashion magazines. To see that work on a daily basis can get into your psyche and be material to draw from. I worked for eight years for David Lachapelle, printing as his printer’s assistant.
One of the most defining moments in my artistic career came in 2000 when I started Blonde and Beyond, a collaboration with artist Heather Marie Vernon. Our ongoing and most prolific project The Beauty Files is a video that depicts us switching between the roles of photographer, videographer, performer, and artist as an exploration of the relationship between “high” and “low” art. We use a “garage punk” aesthetic, comedy, kitsch, drag, and improvisational techniques to investigate notions of ideal beauty, fashion, and culture. We appropriate material from fashion magazines and pop culture. Our faces act as a canvas and makeup becomes paint.
After Heather relocated to Chicago, I returned to my own work, and made the video Till Death for the exhibition The Wedding Project. By exaggerating an ordinary marriage ritual—the cutting of the cake—my intention was to reinterpret the phrase “till death do us part,” and examine the fairy tale notion of living happily ever after. I act as a bride who is the main character and two of my friends fill the roles of the groom and lover. The groom is played by painter and musician Emiliano Maggi, who also collaborates with me on other projects, mainly drawing on my photographs and which started as an off shoot to this project. The new bride panics and has anxieties while trying to cut the wedding cake. She remembers the past in flashbacks and her anxiety manifests in scenes where she is suffocated by her dress. The final exhibited work is the video and, like many of my other works, includes photos and/or stills.
In the summer of 2005 I attended the Braziers residency in Oxfordshire, England, which is part of the Triangle Arts network. The program included an international group of artists working in variety of media resulting in a melting pot of very different cultures and artistic practices. I worked independently and collaboratively during this residency. I made the video Girl about being young, the societal pressures to be beautiful, and woman’s perpetual quest for prettiness. The background music to this video is a young English girl singing Makeup by Lou Reed. I also collaborated with British artist Jessica Rost to create the video Arachne Revealed whose story is inspired by the Greek myth of Arachne. Rost and I act and perform as artificial insects that cannot survive in nature.
In the Fall 2005 I attended another Triangle Arts Workshop, “KMO/ 05” in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Once again I found several interesting artists there to collaborate with, from Iceland, Bolivia, Columbia, and Venezuela. We created a performance art band called “Miss Magenta” that was a multimedia extravaganza. We wrote songs in English and Spanish. Our studio was our factory, where we made our costumes, poster art, stickers, and videos. We became a media sensation in Bolivia and made the cover of the newspaper, El Deber. We also appeared on a morning talk show where the video was shown. These two workshops had a massive impact on my artistic process facilitating experimentation, and exposing me to new cultures and mediums, but also enabled me to leave New York and have the luxury of solely working on my art without the distractions and responsibilities of everyday city life, which I had never experienced before.
My most recent collaboration was my first film The Glass Catastrophe. I collaborated with filmmaker Eric Cheevers, photographer and makeup artist Veronica Ibarra, and musician Ilya Monosov, to create a movie about three girls who take a symbolic journey from womanhood to death. The physical scars on the characters, shown through close-ups, ironically appear glittery and beautiful and are symbolic of the youth and beauty. The psychedelic aesthetic throughout the film and its time-warp flashbacks portray the passage of time in an ethereal way.
