MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
June 12, 2023
This week we recognize Aline Mare, and her early performance art, film, photography and current multimedia works exploring organic interpretations of nature and the human experience.
In the early days of her art practice Mare did a series of performance art pieces, dealing with the psyche of the female body. In these works she used a variety of mediums such as multimedia film, video and slide performances and installations. These works were shown in New York City, San Francisco, and Europe. The image above is of one of these performances titled “I will be,” a solo performance at P space in San Francisco in 1991.
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“S’aline’s Solution” 1991 is a video Mare made many years ago, when she was 40 years old, as a testament to the painful yet powerful right of women to choose. She wanted to find a voice for the pain, an acknowledgment of the courage involved in choosing to have an abortion- a voice she felt had been silenced in our culture. The saline procedure is induced at the end of the first trimester with a local anesthesia of 200 milligrams of hypertonic saline solution. It is a fairly traumatic birthing process which includes dilation, contractions and a chemically induced early labor. It is an especially difficult procedure, an experience which she understood first hand. The video was greeted with much controversy. Many women felt Mare had played into the hands of the Right, appropriating “Back to Life'' imagery and humanizing the embryo. However she believes the piece stands up on its own as an emblematic statement about an issue that remains central and vital in these dangerous times: a woman’s right to choose.
“A series of large fragmented images of young boys (Beautiful Boys 2006-2007, above) on the cusp of manhood, inspired by the fleeting beauty of my own son and his circle of friends in their thirteenth year. They are shot as they float on a bed of water, their spontaneity and vulnerability exposed in a moment of unconscious beauty.”
“Requiem: Aching for Acker” 2018 (below) is a body of work that was directly inspired by Requiem, the last piece of writing by counterculture writer Kathy Acker, a friend of hers – on and off – for decades. It was published as the final part of an opera,Eurydice in the Underworld, by Arcadia Books in London in 1997. A risk-taker and literary outlaw, Acker was a hybrid of punk, postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory in her public identity as well as in her literary works. She died of breast cancer on November 30, 1997 at the age of 53, after a double mastectomy and turning her back on Western medicine. Mare was deeply moved to be a close friend to her in her final days. InRequiem: Aching for Acker, she was looking for a vision to match the feelings: the loss and the power she felt reading her last published book. Something that would remind the world of her power as a creative female force of nature – her self-mythologizing as a form of empowerment and vulnerability. To marry the past and the present in an evocative body of work that speaks to the universality of the path we must all take: the path to the underworld.”
Most recently Mare has created different collections of artworks of which she calls "Psychic Landscapes." In these works she explores a variety of different themes, some of which connect to ideas seen in her earlier works considering the human body. She has also moved into exploring elements of the natural world in a series titled "Cacophony of Change: Extreme Conditions," that deals with storm water basins in the extreme climate conditions in Southern California after record-setting rainfall in the last year. One example is HA (at Hahamongna Watershed), 2023 (below), from her most recent series “Dangerous Landscapes” that synthesizes her own history with natural cycles of the earth.
Aline Mare began her career in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, coming out of a background of theatre, experimental film, and installation art. She was an early member of Collaborative Projects, a collective formed in downtown New York City and performed in a multi-media partnership called Erotic Psyche. She completed undergraduate work at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Studies and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, where she produced the film Saline’s Solution, a series of installations and performances that dealt with abortion from a feminist point of view, which garnered support and awards internationally, exhibiting at The Cinematheque in SF, The Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. She has received several grants and residencies including Fourwinds in Aureille, France, a 2015 Sino-American art tour in Shanghai, Starry Nights in New Mexico, Headlands Center for the Arts, Kala, Film Arts Foundation, New Langton Arts in SF and a New York State Residency for the Arts. She continues to expand her work, concentrating on mixed media and installation, exploring the body and metaphors of nature and its transformative relationship to the human psyche and the state of our planet. New works have been exhibited locally and internationally. www.alinemare.com
Featured images (top to bottom): ©Aline Mare, I will be, 1991, solo performance at P Space, San Francisco; S’aline’s Solution, 1991, 9 minutes VHS on DVD; from series Beautiful Boys 2006-2007, video and photo-based images; Requiem: Aching for Acker, 2018, bloody glove mixed media on archival board, presented at Beyond Baroque, Mike Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles, California; HA (at Hahamongna Watershed), 2023, mounted mixed media, with mica and bees wax, 24 x 36 inches; Portrait of artist by husband Gary Brewer.
