Jenine Marsh at Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art

Jenine Marsh: Microcosm is an exhibition of new sculptural works by Toronto-based artist Jenine Marsh.

In this installation, Marsh has constructed a precarious island where history, value, and utopian longing converge. The exhibition takes its title from an 1808 artist’s manual, Microcosm, which was designed for house-bound bourgeois women to help them imagine and depict the daily lives and labor of the working class. From the protective utopia of the country estate or city mansion, these hobby artists drew and painted images of another utopia: a quasi-real world of fresh air, open spaces, and a purposeful life of work. The image has all the contradictions of imagined utopias: their impossible distance and immanent closeness; an inclusionary heaven constructed from an exclusionary hell; the illusions that drive the self-delusion of separation, and vice versa.

At the center of the installation are three dismantled Canadian Pacific Rail train trunks— flattened, bent, and laid out like a pathway or raft, suspended on plastic buckets. These metallic forms are strewn with pressed coins, image transfers of working-class figures from the exhibition’s eponymous book, and coin-like discs cut from a jigsaw puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. On the wall, the original Bosch, in puzzle form, hangs, partially assembled and framed, its missing pieces replaced by train-pressed coins. Viewers are invited to gently drop coins into the slots on either side. The gallery floor is covered in blue paper, evoking sea and sky, transforming the trunks into a drifting island, unmoored and directionless. From under the golden trunks, the faint sound of trickling water rises. Histories of aspiration and failure weave through Marsh’s installation, where fractured images of paradise blur the line between refuge and ruin. On the ground, embalmed flowers with battery- powered lights suggest stars or torches in an endless cycle of death and resurrection.

Marsh’s Microcosm invites viewers to navigate a world where ideals of paradise and progress fracture under the weight of history. By blending symbols of labor, currency, and utopia, the installation challenges us to consider how value is constructed and who is excluded in the pursuit of perfection. In this drifting, precarious space, Marsh suggests that even in fragmentation, there is the possibility of reimagining what we hold dear—and perhaps, of building something more collective and enduring.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is an artist who uses sculpture and installation to explore themes of agency, mortality, and value. Marsh received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts and her MFA from the University of Guelph.

Marsh’s work has been exhibited in Canadian galleries such as Cooper Cole, Franz Kaka, Nuit Blache, Toronto; Vie d’ange, Centre Clark, Joe Project, Montreal; Griffin Art Projects, and Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.

She has also exhibited in international museums and galleries including Ashley Berlin, Berlin; Prairie Gallery, Chicago; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Essex Flowers, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, OSL Contemporary, Oslo; Entrée Gallery, and Lulu, Mexico City.

She has served as artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet, Bergen; La Datcha, Berlin; SOMA, Mexico City; Rupert, Vilnius; and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson.

She also had a public site-specific installation in the 2023 Nuit Blanche (Toronto) which was curated by Kari Cwynar.

Marsh lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I WANT TO BELIEVE

This exhibition is the first in BICA’s series I WANT TO BELIEVE, a trilogy of exhibitions and related programs addressing crises of faith—locally, globally, and within the art world. The series presents three distinct artistic perspectives on faith, optimism, and the power of belief, tailored for a city of true believers.

THE BUFFALO INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA) is an art and education project for Buffalo founded by Nando Alvarez-Perez and Emily Ebba Reynolds. Through innovative exhibitions, cross-disciplinary skills-based programming, and arts ecology development, BICA aims to model the ways culture can sustain communities through focused, practical engagements with contemporary art. Learn more at thebica.org.