Marnie Weber is a revered multi-media artist who has achieved cult-status throughout her career, crossing disciplines to create artworks that mesh reality with fantasy, and art with horror. Last month, she presented her new film The Night of Forevermore at Cardi Black Box, Milan, set in a fantastical world that is half Halloween parade, half Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Weber has always succeeded in creating surreal personal fictions and alter egos that frequently intersect her punk rock roots (Weber has designed iconic album covers for the likes of Sonic Youth and performed in her very own fictional ghost troupe “The Spirit Girls”) with collage, photography and performance. The Night of Forevermore is no exception to this, with Weber starring as an old witch who has sold her soul to the devil, alongside her daughter, Colette Rose, who plays a young witch. The use of witches is not surprising, with Weber having had a long-standing fascination with their history and witch-hunts for many years.
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In a nod towards Hieronymus Bosch’s “Earthly Delights,” Weber uses medieval costumes, and a cast of period characters, to create a somewhat “living” painting akin to Bosch’s tableauxs. Throughout the film we meet a ghoulish lineup that amplifies Weber’s camp aesthetic, as she and her daughter’s characters traverse representations of heaven, purgatory, and hell, confronting the way we have shaped traditional concepts of good and evil.
Marnie Weber lives and works in Los Angeles. In 1981 she was awarded a B.A. from the University of California and has gone on to exhibit her work both in the US and internationally; such as The Dollhouse, Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, NY (2002); Marnie Weber, Ten-Year Survey of Collage, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London, UK (2004); The Melancholy Circus, Galerie Praz-DeLavallade, Paris, FR (2008); and The Night of Forevermore, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, NY (2012).
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