Artist: Jenine Marsh
Exhibition title: The Extrovert
Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
Date: August 4 – September 3, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto
The Extrovert
By Danielle St. Amour and Jenine Marsh
(1) On the one hand…
An alien face of fluorescing blooms, bending stems, petals and leaves moving with the light.
(2a) And on the other hand…
The correlate event, which is separating the something-ship of the root and the tendril.
(2b) The tendril has means to engage the root. Embodied with a unique agency of proteins and chemicals in the topmost quarters, the tendril directs the root to increase and halt the growth of cells, to climb, (the tendril) and to scale and encompass and embrace, to lift its constituency (the rest) upward, further toward the sun. To feel and examine, determine its surroundings.
(3a) Some of the earliest multiple celled organisms were tentacled polyps that were attached to the sea floor. Their young in their larval stage swam freely but as adults became firmly anchored. Some retained the larval form throughout the life cycle and became free-swimming adults with something like a backbone.
(3b) The head of the tendril when severed sends white noise back to the root, which sends the abbreviated tendrils up anyway, in an ever upward movement, relaying a void message – growth, toward the light. An absence between the root and the tendril, the growth persists.
(4) But on the other hand…
is the head or the finger cut? In a brainless organism does the searching sensing extremity need to be called a head? Is the extremity of the body – whether the head or hand or foot or skin or tendril or blossom – not also the outside of the body? Not body, but surface, edge?
(5a) What is commonly known as King’s lomatia or sometimes, King’s Holly, is not of the holly family. Its leaves are burnished malachite green with strong pink flowers; it bears neither fruit nor seeds.
(5b) A flower for no reason, given freely for no occasion, bearing no message or fruit or seed, may be sterile, sure, but generous and maybe also grossly grotesque – the aimless growth, a strange and purposeless appendage is a benign and beautiful cancer.
(5c) King’s lomatia self-clones: when a branch falls, it spawns, grows new roots, establishing new plants, each one genetically identical to the parent.
(5d) Does the the branch fall off because it is dying or dead or does it fall because it can anticipate its release into an autonomy? Does the finger flee from the arm? Does the extremity run from the trunk only to become itself truncated?
(5e) Separated by each individual plant’s tenancy on a unique root system, each clone’s life span is approximately 300 years; it has been cloning itself for at least 43,600, possibly up to 135,000 years. Very prone to disease.
(5f) Only one colony of King’s lomatia is known to be alive in the wild.
(6.1) But on the other hand…
Your foot on these cast surfaces feels the radiant warmth from the sun that hangs on, on the extroverted surface, an introverted warmth.
(6.2) Not dead, not alive, a suspended moment. A disembodied, freshcut life. Untethered, more alive than living, excessive, mobile and vivid.
(6.3) Castrate from the root – a compromise toward motility.
(6.4) The cut flower too is without design, unstrategic growth, like the fingernails of a corpse.
(6.5) Something-ship, fleshly object freed of impetus.
Notes:
The ENFP is a true free spirit. The INFP is a true idealist.
The ENFJ is a natural-born leader. The INFJ is not an idle dreamer.
Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary, Canada) received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2013 and her BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in numerous art venues including The Bakery, Vancouver; COOPER COLE, 8-11, G Gallery, Toronto; Ed Video, Guelph; Truck Gallery, Stride Gallery, Calgary; and Struts Gallery, Sackville, Canada; Chapter 61, Brooklyn; Fourteen30, Portland; and most recently Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, USA. She has twice served as artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2009 and 2010, and other residencies include the Vermont Studio Centre in 2011, Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ Alberta Future Leaders programme, 2011 and Struts Gallery, 2010. Her recent solo exhibition, “Feminine Marvelous and Tough” at Lulu, Mexico City, has been featured on ARTnews, Mousse Magazine and Contemporary Art Daily. Marsh lives and works in Toronto, Canada
