Jenine Marsh at Lulu / DFMexico

Jenine Marsh
feminine marvelous and tough

Lulu
Bajio 231, the red door (corner of Manzanillo). 
Colonia Roma
06760 DFMexico

http://www.luludf.com/
28/11, 2015 – 31/11, 2016




Lulu is pleased to present a solo exhibition of
the Toronto-based, Canadian artist Jenine Marsh.
Jenine Marsh basically makes sculpture, which
is, to borrow a phrase from the American poet Ted Berrigan
feminine marvelous and tough. Working with a variety of materials,
including plaster, clay, concrete, synthetic rubber, and metals, she reserves a
special place for flowers in her production. Indeed, they are known to function
as lexical units, images, indexes and highly-textured materials in what she
does. She is interested in the multitude of contradictions that they are liable
to contain. For all their alleged clich
és-ness and naiveté,
they are both as a material and a symbol in fact inexhaustible. Objects of
candor, they are also known to conceal an unwieldy polysemy, while being art
historically indissociable from the memento mori and certain received notions
of so-called femininity. It is for these as well as practical reasons that
Marsh is particularly drawn to daisies and mums by virtue of their simplicity
and durability, their toughness.
For her exhibition at Lulu, the artist focuses
on this aspect of her sculptural practice, working exclusively with daisies and
mums. She has gathered together a great quantity of the two different kinds of
flowers and subjected them to a treatment in which she massages them and
saturates them in synthetic rubber. As such, their decomposition is all but
arrested and they are made to enter a state that is at once organic and
inorganic, living and dead. After this treatment, the flowers are flattened by
hand and applied to the floor and walls of Lulu, as if seeking to the wed
themselves to its surfaces while activating those surfaces with a certain
haptic quality. Framed by a shinny, light green floor, this single, unified
installation of floral hyperbole blossoms into a gesture of material and
symbolic understatement.
Jenine Marsh (b. 1984) is an artist based in
Toronto, Canada. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes: Feral Tongue,
Chapter 61, New York (2015); The cut flower still blooms, 8-11, Toronto (2015).
Group exhibitions include: Mrs. Benway, Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland OR
(2015); What she is not, what she is, what she can be, Group exhibition at
Garden Avenue, Toronto (2015); Road to Ruin, Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto
(2015); The Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary, Lulu, Mexico City (2015).