No one word suffices to describe the type of artist that Marnie Weber is, after a wide and varied career. The Los Angeles-based artist works with a variety of media, including film, collage art, photography, sculpting, costume design and, on top of that, as lead vocalist and songwriter for her band the Spirit Girls. “I have a background in performance and so I learned to work in many mediums to put on one-person stage shows,” says Weber. As diverse as these genres might be, they are all “linked together through a narrative of [her] own creation.” Alluding to pop culture and quirky versions of childhood fairy tales, Weber’s work is unusually imaginative.
Taking cues from real life events, fiction and imagination become one in her most recent series called The Spirit Girls, which is about a group of girls who died in the 70s, having missed their calling in life. To make matters more complicated, their spirits come back and they form a progressive rock band. “In actuality I do have a band that performs as "The Spirit Girls" in masks and costumes,” says Weber. The band, in turn, became increasingly vital in her visual art. These determined characters reappear in two of her films and have populated many collages featuring their travels, as well as sculptures and other pieces. “The narrative is character-based and I am expressing different sides of the characters I am creating.”
“It all came about by playing with scale,” says Weber about the Dollhouse series that exudes an eerie, even mystic feeling. Inspired by the idea of “how the former inhabitants are like ghosts and we are like the dolls living in their houses because they are as large as the universe,” these arduously assembled collages are indeed a “labor of love,” as Weber puts it. First creating a diorama which is photographed with a 4x5 camera and blown up to a larger scale, she then takes pictures of herself posing in costumes which are scanned, color corrected, printed out for proper scale, hand cut and finally glued onto the photograph.
Link:
www.marnieweber.com
