Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have worked in the field of large format sculpture, mixed media, installation and electronic art since 2000.
The work of Marman and Borins addresses tensions that arise in the politicization, historicization and visuality of the artwork. These tensions are presented as a confrontational platform, whereby aesthetic and ideological perceptions are either eroded or re-affirmed. While their work is conceptual by inception, Marman and Borins rely on the physicality of the art object to convey a stance that shifts paradigms of object based art, rather than dematerializing the object. On a formal level they employ a diverse physical vocabulary utilizing materials from the commercially designed and industrially built world. The physical style in which Marman and Borins present their art often conflates mass-produced design and communications with references that serve to deconstruct the history of the political avant-garde in art. Their work addresses these subjects on an aesthetic and conceptual level by positing strategies of visual resistance and paradox, amidst the ambiguity of a globalized political landscape where ideological stances are dissipating.
With regard to format and execution, the mixed-media works of Marman and Borins address features of twentieth century art practice through the use of contemporary visual culture and mainstream forms of communication. They also present projects that self-reflexively question the object’s existence as a work of art. Marman and Borins express these themes within concurrent and contrasting concerns: the combined style of post-minimalism and electronic art; the paradox of presenting visual culture as a de facto institutional presentation of art; and modernist formalism and abstraction transliterated into popular aesthetics. The artists are also known for their ability to oscillate between brazen comedic gestures and wry poetic overtures.
While it is unorthodox for artists to grapple with such divergent approaches, Marman and Borins see this tension as precisely the impetus of their practice. The heterodox thrust of their style expresses philosophically and formally a nonconformist, and dissenting outlook. The artists practice a form of confrontational aesthetics that responsively answers to the modalities of exhibiting and manifesting art works. They often aestheticize the political or situational concerns that they are confronted with in the art world, and present this aestheticization in the format of a transliteration of formal styles in modernist art. Additionally, they punctuate this survey of art with contemporary references to mass culture. The result of these transliterative forays is a visual incision and incursion into the story of art, and a depiction of how symbols of art can be used as a form of visual grammar and diction. This form of avant-gardism can be exemplified by a polemical scenario where the veracity of twentieth century art is thrown into turmoil in the same manner that utopianism is confused with the promise of consumerism. It follows that new forms of visual syntax and expression arise as the faults and fissures of contemporary art are shifted by the changing landscape of contemporary mass culture. In a consumerist world where ideological axioms are dwindling, former pillars of truth giving way to the realization that everything is not figured out. Marman and Borins are unapologetic in their presentation of a complex network of ambiguities, while formally adhering to the aesthetics of the subjects that they critique.
With regard to their electronic and multimedia works, Marman and Borins pursue issues of subjectivity, the beholding of the work of art, and the formal strategies required for the engagement of the viewer. They pursue interactivity with the intention of creating a generative space between the viewer and the work. The artists invite the viewer to become a public participant in the work, thus creating two levels of reception: the participant and the observing audience. This division in how the work is beheld destabilizes the singularity of a viewer’s subjectivity, and opens the possibility of a mutual form of reception by the various viewers who behold the artwork. The purist aesthetics of Marman and Borins’ electronic work hearkens to a post-minimalist impulse that counters hermeticism in favour of a broadening vocabulary of the viewer as performer. Formally, their electronic works are performative stages for the interactive expression of aesthetic scenarios, realized in an exquisite and understated manner. Their interactive works are shown as-and-beside projects that explore notions of transliteration, mass media, and the historical avant-garde.
Since 2006, Marman and Borins have worked in the field of public sculpture. Within this forum they adapt their experimental gallery practice to the public sphere. Within this format they present themes of scale, visuality, formalism and the architectural, while addressing the scruples that inform the manner in which public sculpture should exist within public space. Their sculptures are formally comprised of commercial materials fabricated in large-scale industrial formats. The sculptures that Marman and Borins make are governed by different contexts. The artists have exhibited in temporary forums for public art, opting in these cases for confrontational and conceptual forms of sculpture. Permanent sculpture, commissioned for publicly owned institutions provides the opportunity to address issues of locale and context to site. Commercial commissions are often met with issues of visuality, form, and symbolism.