Maria Marshall

Marshall is best known for her video works. They often take her two sons, Raphael and Jacob as their subjects, and through structurally simple looped mini-movies explore in a complex and sophisticated way our preconceptions about childhood and the way in which looking through the eyes of a child can give us a particularly powerful perspective on our adult world.

Lollipop (In 200 days I will be 11) is a close up view of Raphael’s face shown as a large format projection in cinematic wide-screen format. The work combines a filmic atmosphere with a strictly non-narrative structure. In a six and a half second loop the camera pans up and down the boy’s face, always frustrating the viewer’s desire to see the whole. The music, a Damon Albarn track, and the lollipop stick in the boy’s mouth, both bring to mind the seminal 1966 Spaghetti Western, featuring Clint Eastwood The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. This work also makes reference to Marshall’s most widely known work, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Cooker, in which her son apparently blows smoke rings from a cigarette he appears to be smoking.

Alongside the video Marshall will show a new body of photographic portraits of her son, which draw on the formulaic language of the cowboy genre. They are at once images of being and imagining, of a boy’s dreams of becoming an adult, and of the parallel isolation of his fantasy world and the romantic imagination of Western films.

Like much of Marshall’s work, this body of video and photographs exploit a tension. Here it is the opposition of innocence and experience, poetically contained within a single image.