in silico #2 [experiment for better life forms] - Limited Edition 4 of 10 Photograph

As a visual artist and experimental filmmaker, I use drawing, sculpture, collage, video and digital manipulation to build audio-visual constructs. Inspired by biological mechanisms, my work articulates itself and flows through multiple media. Analog and digital processes intertwine to create fantastical microcosms and proto-organisms. I'm interested in the concept of life as an evolutionary process, from its origin to its hypothetical future. Using the human body as a starting point for multi-disciplinary experiments, my process mimics speciation in natural selection: several new bodies of work branch off from one common ancestor to eventually give rise to their own distinct line. The series “Palimpsests” focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the human body. Photographies of (friends and self) are altered using different processes [burning, scratching, drawing, collages]. The collages are then photographed and printed. They translate the constant shifts of the matter, the impermanent and transitory nature of the human body. These images provide the starting point for my digital work. Through further manipulations they merge into organic abstractions, a combination of biological elements and cosmic phenomena. This latest transformation allows a different class of organisms to appear, a species born from the metamorphosis of the human body and its technological mutation. The organic-digital occurrences become an intuitive ontology of the species, an inventory of modified life forms. "Marianne Magne should be the hero in an H.P. Lovecraft story: A bold French explorer who is able to reach between the folds of our common human experience, wrestle with the creatures she finds there, and drag their haunting images from just beyond the fringe. Human forms seem to emerge from the textures of rust, charcoal, and dusky light, only to be reabsorbed. Abstraction becomes refraction and though the effect is beautiful and unshakeable, it is often quite dark. In her series Palimpsests, pictures have been manipulated over the course of many years, making for a near-organic evolution of form that slips between microcosmic and extraterrestrial. Her video and sculpture work inhabit a similar plane between the earthly and the ethereal, It is an interconnected world of fantasy and ancestry where cells easily morph into intergalactic cephalopods, and bones become cathedrals that inspire myths.