Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Mariah Garnett

Signal

Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 7:0 | USA | 2012

The script for Signal, a 7-minute, 16mm film, attempts to narrativize a collection of spam emails gathered over a 3-year period, and is staged in or near ?sacred spaces?. The landscape of Pyramid Lake, on the Paiute Indian reservation is populated by 10,000-year-old rock formations, many of which are off limits to the public. They loom in the background as characters banter in the sometimes awkward, sometimes solicitous, sometimes nonsensical dialog of spam. The Black Rock Desert Playa, while vacant most of the year, is home to close to 60,000 people annually during Burning Man. These locations were chosen because they act as both mirror and foil for the internet - at once wastelands and gathering sites for millions of people, while maintaining an ancient physicality that transcends any inhabiting group.

Mariah Garnett is an experimental filmmaker and artist living and working in Los Angeles. Her work seeks to occupy a space between convention and experimentation - or, rather, to experiment with convention. The boundaries of adaptation, documentary and fiction are continually being drawn and re-drawn in her work. A big part of her practice involves finding people or thing out in the world to inhabit for a spell. For the most part, these figures are significant, though many times unknown, players in queer history. These twisted homages go so far as to ingest and regurgitate identities to the point where the maker?s motivation is called into question. Garnett holds an MFA from Calarts in Film/Video and a BA from Brown University in American Civilization. Her work has been screened internationally including the following venues: Venice Biennial (Swiss Offsite Pavillion), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Beiruit), Outfest (Los Angeles), Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), Mix NYC, Girl Monster (Hamburg). In 2012 she took part in a 2 person show Common Era at ltd los angeles. In 2011 she had a solo show at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles titled Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin and has had work in group shows at Acuna Hansen Gallery (Los Angeles), Montehermoso Cultural Center (Vittoria, Spain) and Workspace Gallery (Los Angeles). She has collaborated with artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Zackary Drucker, A.L. Steiner and Chiara Giovando. She is represented by ltd los angeles.