Image:Past Present, 2007 Archival pigment print, 101.6cm x 147.3cm
6 April–21 April 2011
Blain|Southern is delighted to present a new series of photographs by the acclaimed American artist Malerie Marder, staged to mark the publication of Carnal Knowledge, the fruit of the artist’s four-year collaboration with Violette Editions.
Ever since she first started exhibiting her photos in the late 1990s, Marder has explored the psychosexual undertow of her own intimate relationships, frequently ‘shooting herself along with family and friends in close quarters’ (including pay-by-the-hour motels) and, usually, undressed. Her work flirts with prurience, with ideas of privacy and surveillance, eroticism and pornography, and the complications of love.
Discussing Carnal Knowledge, Marder says: “I used to have anxiety about my pictures exposing things too private, but the real intimacies are censored out. I still get pangs of self-consciousness, but it’s too late for regret. What was I thinking when I made the pictures? This is in no particular order: fate, kink, performance, a secret, nostalgia, sensual memory, voyeurism, nighttime settings, barren rooms, stark lighting, romantic trysts, foreign environments, intimacy, lack of intimacy, connection, lack of connection, self-reflection, lack of selfreflection, awkwardness, isolation, random, purpose, shadow, vulnerability, immaturity, innocence, amorous bodies, ambiguity, cocoons of emotion, modernist architecture, transience, lurid smells, a patient’s sickbed, love, eroticism, clarity, blushing, bruised, family, boyfriends, conflict, loyalty, disapproval, neuroticism, narcissism, truculence, numbness, sexual discomfort, subconscious, and the past. None of it is relevant now.”*
Marder’s most recent project, titled ‘Anatomy’, has been photographing call girls and their customers in a brothel in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
