MARINA ZURKOW
2016
Dandelion leaves, flowers, tincture, custom structures, costumes, tour guides, umbrellas, meadow
In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Petersen, Aaron Marx
All images courtesy Dan Marshall
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation
http://makingthebestofit.today/
This work is part of the project:
Over the course of 16 months in Minneapolis, geographer and social practice artist Valentine Cadieux and Marina Zurkow, with a group of collaborators and participants, explored what it might mean to “make the best of it” (“it” being climate change), using dandelions to think through eating differently, nimbly, with sadness, resilience and even joy.
2016
Silkscreen on found/used cardboard with rubber stamping
14″x14″
Edition of 3
Additionally unique, SP collages on silkscreen
This work is part of the project:
Accretions is a series of silkscreens on repurposed packaging cardboard. These works describe agglomerations of consumer goods: the result of what is bought, shipped globally, and discarded over time.
2016
Custom Cannonball jellyfish soup powder, caramels, snack puffs
Food prototypes by chefs Ryan Pera (Coltivare), and Justin Yu and Ian Levy (Oxheart)
Supported by CENHS (the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences) at Rice University
This work is part of the project:
Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regional site-specific pop-up food shacks, installations, carts, tea houses, delivery drones, and designed community dinners that feature edible climate-change enabled, and often not normally eaten, indicator species as part of the menu.
2016
Custom commercial postcards, 4″ x 6″
This work is part of the project:
A selection of geographically distributed port nations were analyzed for their relative trade stronghold in particular materials and items. These were then converted into textile designs for new national identities based on the materials’ / items’ corresponding iconography.
2016
This work is part of the project:
Surya Mattu, Sarah Rothberg, and I had a Process Space residency through LMCC on Governor’s Island. We spent a few months traveling by boat(s) to meet, study, and discuss logistics. We took Matthew Sparke’s free online class on Globalization and Personal Impacts, and read Deborah Cowan’s The Deadly Life of Logistics. We participated in Open…
2014 – ongoing
posters, sound, installations
Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Web Development: Pat Shiu
Sound Design: Pejk Malinovski
Typography: Nancy Nowacek
Voice Overs: Eliza Foss, Seth Kanor, Jane Cramer
Supported by NYU Visual Arts Initiative Awards
http://www.dearclimate.net
This work is part of the project:
Dear Climate is exploring new modes of address through the creation of a collection of ”inner climate” tools. These tools—posters, audio meditations and letters—are designed to nudge participants toward new relations with the greater-than-human world. The free, downloadable posters use the language of agitprop and a “fast read” to create a jolt of relational suggestion. Alternately,…
2014
Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests
Collaborators: Lucullan Foods
Hosted by Joseph Campana and Timothy Morton, with generous support from The Arts Initiatives Fund and The Humanities Research Center.
Presented by CENHS (Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences @ Rice)
This work is part of the project:
A dinner for 50, co-hosted by philosopher Timothy Morton and poet Joseph Campana, that explored the concept of Deep Time and the multiple million-years-long process of fossil fuel formation, embodied in a seven course meal. The guests were primarily from the academic and arts communities in Houston. The purpose was to field test the effect…
2014
Software-driven animation, outdoor projection
Add’l animation: Sarah Rothberg
Software: Sam Brenner
Commissioned by SPUrban, Sao Paulo, Brasil
São Paulo was built on top of the Mata Atlântica, a formerly vast forest habitat that, in spite of the radical reduction to 8% of its original land cover, still contains a large proportion of unique (endemic) species. In the software-driven animation Mesocósmico (Paulista), aspects of urban life and the surrounding Brazilian rainforest–trees, animals, water–are…
2014
Software-driven animation. 73-hour year-long cycle (never repeats).
Triptych. Color, animation, sound
Format: Flash player/projector on (intel) MacPro with 3 monitors / projections
Dimensions variable
Animators: Marina Zurkow, Sarah Rothberg
Software Developer: Sam Brenner
Sound: Lem Jay Ignacio and Marina Zurkow
Add’l Software: Yotam Mann
Commissioned by The Museum of Biblical Art, New York
Mesocosm (Times Square, NY) is an algorithmic work that represents the passage of time in a speculative, hybrid Times Square. 12 minutes of real world time elapse in each minute of screen time, one year lasts 73 hours. No cycle is identical to the last, as the appearance and behavior of the human and non-human characters,…
2014
Valerie Vogrin and Marina Zurkow, editors
Published by Punctum Books
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/petroleum-manga/
This work is part of the project:
The Petroleum Manga, first conceived of and rendered as 10-foot banners printed on Tyvek for gallery installation is now reproduced in book form. Originally, manga was used in Japanese to refer to whimsical drawings or picture books. Long before manga was a multi-billion-dollar-a-year comic book industry, there was Hokusai’s thirteen-volume manga, depicting everything from trees…
2013
Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests
808 Gallery Boston University
With Lucullan Foods and Michael Connor
Presented by the School of Visual Arts, in collaboration with Boston University’s Programs in Food and Wine.
This work is part of the project:
The French phrase hors d’ouevre literally means “outside of the work,” that is, outside the design of the meal. Petrochemicals infuse our foods, and while these byproducts of petroleum lie outside our designs on eating, they are intimately meshed with the foods we produce, transport and consume.You are invited to a multi-course tasting that invokes…
2013
Tyvek, solvent ink, plastic regrind
Life-size
Unique
This work is part of the project:
All photos by John Berens
2012-2014
Project consisting of videos, dinners, software, sculptures, public art engagements, printed matter
Diverseworks gallery text by John Pluecker
Commissioned by Diversweworks, Houston Texas
Supported by a 2011 John F Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
This work is part of the project:
Necrocracy is a meditation on geology, time, nature and petrochemical production. First exhibited at Diverseworks in Houston, Texas, Necrocracy featured newly commissioned video animation, drawing and sculpture. Questioning the division between the natural and the human inherited from the Romantic era, the works navigate between human manufacturing of petroleum-based products, ecology, and the geological chronology…
2012
Lecture and tasting for invasive species
In collaboration with chef and exotic food procurer Gene Rurka
Presented by MAM Contemporaries
MAM Contemporaries’ presented “The Cute, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Inspired by the exhibition Marina Zurkow: Friends, Enemies, and Others, on view at MAM (Sept 2011 – Mar 2012), this unique participatory food performance comprised a lecture led by the artist and a tasting catered by Gene Rurka, the celebrity exotic chef, hunter, and farmer, known…
2012
‘Local’ dinner for 25, menu, prints
In collaboration with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman
Chefs: Lucullan Foods (Lauryn Tyrell, Loryn Hatch, and Albert Nyguyen)
Foragers: Holly Drake, Oliver Kellhammer, Bun Lai, Andrew Nundel & your hosts
Photo documentation: M.Cianfrani, M_DOK
Commissioned by The Artists Institute
The Invitation You are invited to “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem,” a dinner that renders the local exotic, and the exotic all too local. We are serving a meal harvested in nearby waters or foraged on the adjoining shores. Tong-ho. Whores’ eggs. Knotweed. Sapidissima. Sumac. These words feel strangely potent in the mouth. Language…
2012
Sculptural objects and printed materials
In collaboration with Christie Leece
Commissioned by ISEA 2012 and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance
Gila 2.0: Warding Off the Wolf consists of a “cattle armor system” of predator deterrent devices focused on the wolf based on aversion and deterrent research conducted in animal cognitive behavior and predator control. Our research and design propositions offer a self-defense system for cattle using GPS, sound and olfactory output devices, video sensing, surveillance, and…
2012
Tychem® TK fabric, acrylic , Velcro, rubber, mannekin
Fabrication : Lara Grant
Tychem® TK fabric courtesy of DuPont(tm)
Approx 45” tall
Edition of 5 suits
This work is part of the project:
Dupont’s patented Tychem hazardous materials clean-up suits are used in petroleum industry disaster response to mitigate ecological disasters. These suits have been re-scaled to outfit them for children. These suits are sealed to prevent humans from entering them, thus assuring that no children are harmed in the process.
2012
Participatory performance
In collaboration with Sarah Rothberg
Premiered at New Museum IDEAS CITY
This work is part of the project:
Immortal Plastics (IP) Assessment Services is a performative, methodological procedure which determines the depth of participants’ relations with hydrocarbons and positions participating individuals on a timeline of plastic’s ancient past and indefinite future. 250 million years ago during the Permian Period, marine microorganisms died and accumulated in sediments on the floor of a vast saline…
2012
Two-channel animation, black and white, silent
5 min,12 sec loop
Animation assistance: Lindsay Nordell
Edition of 5
This work is part of the project:
The movement of a pump jack (known colloquially as a “thirsty bird”), and a public water fountain are synchronized in a transitory dance. As the pump pulls oil upward, the water fountain spurts water. An array of archetypal individuals—cowboys and Indians, a father and his son, a county sheriff, a cow, a soldier, a girl…