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.
