Meghan Marie Malar

Statement

Meghan Marie Malar’s art practice exists at the intersection of effort and non-effort, deeply informed by her sojourn in a Californian Zen monastery following her disillusionment with the machinery of Hollywood, where she trained as a filmmaker. Her artworks, bearing the mark of this influence, are sites of restraint and intense curation. Marie Malar strives to condense lived experience into simple form, guided by the thought of creating moving image pieces that feel like stones gently chiseled by water. She is particularly interested in dream-like imagery, allowing, through time for idleness and daydreaming, space for her interior life to come mysteriously to the surface.

A new development in her work is that Marie Malar finds herself countering the intangible nature of moving image with sculptural objects. To her, sculptures are often mysterious and withholding, yet substantial in a way video can never be. She seeks harmony by combining the two, ‘re-absorbing’ sculptural objects into moving images by filming them.

GlogauAIR Project

At GlogauAIR, Marie Malar investigates the ritual practices of France and Malaysia, her homelands, to create an image repertoire reflecting her inner topography.

Her exploration of French imagery, rooted in daytime and drawing on the Catholic imagination, incorporates childhood impressions of life in the French countryside to form work imparting a personal relationship with the divine. Meanwhile, night becomes the cover under which her study of Malaysian imagery takes place. It is, as Phillipe Charlier notes in Rituals, “the moment when spirits roam […] where human nature is in parentheses”. A focal point lies in the ritual of dressing, and how potent a vehicle it was for the transmission of her maternal heritage. She is further compelled by the wealth of class signifiers embedded in sartorial choices, and the impact of British colonialism on Malaysian fashion.

Through the creation of a series of trance-like moving images exploring these two sides of her heritage, she abstracts overt religious symbols and rituals in hopes of generating a cinematic language that feels spectral and sacred. She is guided by the notion of the visible revealing the invisible, and of images acting as openings or passages. She considers Paul Schrader’s essay on transcendental cinema, where he speaks of “purify[ing] the image by gradually converting it into an expressive image”. She investigates why abstracted forms seem to her more spiritually resonant than representational ones.

Her current art practice takes these theoretical concepts and confronts them with material realities: her time at GlogauAIR represents the initial stages of a search for a visual language that inches toward the sacred.

Moving image and Sculpture

CV Summary

Education

• 2014-2018 University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
• 2007-2014 International School of Geneva

Experience

• 2020 Editor at Association des Commerçants Paris-Bercy
• 2019 Art Intern at Budman Studios
• 2019 Development Intern at Marginal Mediaworks
• 2018 Development Intern at Highland Film Group
• 2017 Workshop leader and Jury President at European Student Film Festival
• 2017 Editor at United Nations Radio and Television Department
• 2015 Editor at Fondation Hardt

Group Exhibitions

• 2022 I, Nature in the GlogauAIR Project Space
• 2021 Longing/Belonging in the GlogauAIR Project Space

Gallery