God is an Audiobook

Wednesday, April 10, 2019
3:30 PM 4:30 PM 15:30 16:30

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MIEKE MARPLE

God is an Audiobook

1301PE Annex on Wilshire

10 April - 10 May 2019

1301PE is pleased to present God is an Audiobook, Mieke Marple’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Marple is an artist and writer and this new series of paintings combines her interests in both visual and textual narrative.

In White Girls Have Depth Too, a mini-memoir presented as a companion piece to the paintings on view, Marple describes becoming familiar with the work of Eckhardt Tolle via audiobooks. Initially skeptical that “self-help” content would appeal to her, Marple developed a deep interest in the material, one that bordered on obsession. Her early skepticism stemmed from many of the same value judgments made in the field of visual arts, in which “high art” is contrasted with “low-brow art,” “folk art,” “graphic art,” et cetera and where highly emotional content in artwork is often seen as naïve or in conflict with intellectual/commercial interests. In her mini-memoir, Marple also attempts to portray whiteness, historically treated as “neutral,” as a distinct and articulable experience. It is also one in which, despite the relatively low-brow status of the self-help genre, understanding self-actualization as an act of privilege is often overlooked.

In this new series of paintings, Marple presents different archetypes—skeletons, clowns, ballerinas, hermits, et cetera—and creates a bright and vivid atmosphere by layering these images with renderings of flowers. These flowers do not function in a symbolic manner in the paintings; instead, Marple suggests, “They are mood. They simply are and in this way resemble consciousness or presence.” In A New Earth, Tolle writes that flowers were likely the first non-functional objects to be appreciated by humans because of their ability to mirror consciousness back to us. Marple considers the flowers, rendered realistically, to be analogous to "situation" in writing, i.e. uninterpreted moments that happen in a specific place and time. By contrast, the central, unpainted archetypes are analogous to “story” in writing, i.e. larger themes that run through the course of a text. To accompany her paintings, Marple also created a short video animation pairing several of her drawings with the sound of Tibetan bells, the same sound Tolle uses in his audiobooks to demarcate chapters.

In these artworks and mini-memoir, Marple attempts to balance the personal with the universal and the specific with the abstract. Marple picks subjects that are open to projection and then fleshes them out through the addition of flowers in her paintings and conversations in her mini-memoir to create an embodiable experience by which the reader/viewer can access universal tropes.

Mieke Marple (b. 1986, Mountain View, CA) received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. She was co-owner of Night Gallery (Los Angeles) from 2011 until 2016. In 2012, Marple produced the web series Feast of Burden, directed by filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko and distributed by MOCAtv. In 2014, she co-founded the “Sexy Beast Benefit for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles” gala and art auction, and remains on the organization’s advisory board. Marple has been written about by The New York Times and W Magazine, among other publications. Recent exhibitions include The Internet Archive’s 2018 Artist In Residence Exhibition and Relocation Tarot (2018) at Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco). In November 2019, she will be having her first solo exhibition at Ever Gold [Projects]. Marple lives and works in San Francisco.

The exhibition will take place in the 1301PE Annex and the entrance is on Wilshire Blvd.

Tagged 2019