A Negotiation of Memories by Shirley Madill
Marianne Reim's art is like a spiritual visual poesis. Experiencing her work is like traveling through a mysterious world of hidden messages and inscriptions that are to be decoded like sacred archaeological finds, where we would discover the true meaning to our existence. Through a synthesis of text and image, she offers verbal visual messages that have symbolic reference to history and life experience. Reim has been making book sculptures constructed of steel and stone for the over 10 years. The book works combine elements of architecture, sculpture and the written word. As viewers, we attempt to find meaning by reading and mentally peeling away the layers to get at the core of the work. It is a process of discovery and making sense of the world around us. Reim encourages us to slow down, think and deconstruct the information she relays and come to a reason as to why it affects us. Language is the place where she begins.
As children where we are situated socially is constructed by our language. It is the cement that binds and maintains the social world of experience. Reim`s objects remain close to the familiar and everyday, yet their corporeal functions are highly suggestive. Reim has selected to make these objects manually, by her own hand, cutting and burning words into hard materials such as steel. The materials she uses suggest muteness, a paradox, for within the inscribed words and signs, the language base, lie silent speechless objects. Through this work, Marianne Reim gives communal meaning to our existence.
Through the use of a welding instrument, Reim has inscribed religious texts such as The Lord’s Prayer in various languages including her native language, German. These sculptures evoke a medieval scriptorium similar to sacred books where religious figurs or monks would labouriously copy texts from history. Reim’s books usually follow a chronology with each book representing a pivotal passage in her life. However the personal is transcended and her books become a metaphor for the a “Book of Life” wherein all of humankind’s history is enscribed. As Reim states about her work, “ the specific forms of my work float on the surface of a well of memory. I create discreet objects, objects in series and installation. My preferred material is steel. In my constructions the material wears its identity through rough cut edges, visible welds and an undisguised slabness. I may combine them with wire, stone, text and miscellaneous findings. By cutting, burning and welding, experience, memory and emotion are melded into steel.
Her recent major project titled BURNT OFFERING (THE ENTIRE ISAIAH SCROLL) BURNT OFFERING takes on the challenge of inscribing the entire text of the Dead Sea Scrolls on large plates of steel. Between 1947 and 1956 thousands of fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents were discovered in eleven caves near the site of Khirbet Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea. These important texts have revolutionized our understanding of the way the Bible was transmitted, and have illuminated the general cultural and religious background of ancient Palestine, out of which both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity arose. Large in scale, Reim’s installation consists of 87 (2.0m x .50m) plates of steel joined together in the form of open pages. Grouped together fitting within a room, viewers are immersed inside the steel pages where reading becomes a physical experience.
Reim’s sculpture uses a physical language to arrive at form and message. The process involved in its making is inseparable from its content. Attracted to objects that have stored histories there is a kind of alchemy at work in her process. Meaning and form come together in her work and the meaning is embedded in the material of steel as well as its form. Reim looks for specific proximities that lock in tensions to produce a communication or meaning. When installed, BURNT OFFERING is a dark and lusciously mysterious exhibition. It demands a semi-darkened gallery with spotlights casting dramatic light on the words. Inscribed through fire the wavering texts create a revelatory insight into the nature of form, mass and substance. This sculptural transformation is an attempt to unite material and form in a complete economy of substance. This was the point of entry for her agenda of transcendental materiality, the aspiration of form and mass toward an immanent and ideal immateriality. The new scrolls are free of the formative constraints of the world in which they existed as they mark a transformation through another dimensional state. For Reim, steel represents the density of the image, its energy. These plates, in all their indeterminate manifestations, are silhouettes that stand like a Richard Serra sculpture representing an ideal of congruence between the container and the contained. These are discrete objects which, because they equivocate on the verge of identity, radiate an unsettling energy.
BURNT OFFERING becomes a conceptual locus for dialogue with reference and perception precisely because they are from and in the past. Steeped in a somnolent aura, just like the architectural presence of an historical palace or cave, this work is a dramatic tableau of human memory.
The secondary animation in the work comes from the double mnemonic charge enacted by the work itself becoming a memory in the observer. The work elaborates in an expansive, oddly disquieting atmosphere operating like a parallel language. Also, because it is appears so grounded, the message is located and transmitted in a three-dimensional continuum. The walls of steel are pictorial spaces – the surface of the plates burnt with sacred text. Most importantly these works are anti-ontological devices the sole purpose of which is to restlessly subvert the process of perceiving them, categorically or in any way other than a direct, pre-verbal apprehension.
Marieanne Reim’s work cannot be considered theory-based. Her works have consistently proven to be experiential. For her the thinking comes during the making while she is interpreting or inscribing her texts. Her process is dependant on a belief in the veneration of the sub-conscious. In this work she believes that viewers can enter the work if they choose, carrying their own set of reference points, because sub-conscious meaning and symbolism share a collective or universal language, as well as a deeply personal one.
Amidst the socio-politically uncertain times that we live in and the proliferation of free floating images, words, and objects provided by fractured identities and deconstructed discourses of the art world, this work may have an obvious reference yet be open-ended. Over the past 20 years, a thread that has run through Reim’s work has been a focus on transcendence and illumination – of operations that are psychic, abstract and concrete. There have been substantive interconnections in her art-making—from the installation approach to a use of codified information imbued in the work, giving it a talisman-like or poetic quality.
BURN OFFERING is an artistic “translation” of subjectivity on the part of the artist and the viewers’ willingness to travel across the many boundaries (some implicit others explicit) to enter into a new world is significant in understanding the work. As the viewers explore the plurality of aspects of the installation —formal, cognitive and emotional—the apocryphal web of the sources unfold.
This installation is an exploration of gesture in a ritual sense and just like speech gestures can reflect the broader meanings and implications of the ambiguous nature of the relationship between knowledge (personal, social, artistic) and the individual self. Expression in language or art through gestures is the result of deliberate choices culled from privatized codes and “translated” through bodily manifestations such as voice, flesh, and movement. This ambiguity of gesture/speech coupled with the ambiguity of “position” (social, artistic, etc.) in the work of Marianne Reim, i.e. to be inside and outside at the same time, to have steadfastly refused to become disembodied from either matter or the social, makes her art most creative and relevant to our times.
In differing degrees and manner Reim has developed a practice that has operated outside the mainstream theoretical apparatuses yet she has never abandoned her belief in art-making as an intuitive, embodied process, as opposed to merely illustrating the latest theoretical “turn.” In one way or another, she has made art that is a negotiation of memories, tensions, and unfinished business from history. The result is a kind of experimental writing that emphasizes the process—the act of writing itself—and reveals the magical origin of communication by words.
Shirley Madill Executive Director at THE KITCHENER-WATERLOO ART GALLERY
Hamilton 2011
SELECTED REVIEWS, ARTICLES, BOOKS, CATALOGUES:
www.blurb.com A NEGOTIATON OF MEMORIES M. Reim
2024 ART BIENNALE BASEL 2024 MOCAMAG Contemporary Art Museum Switzerland
2024 WOMEN ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD 7th Edition Dubai, UEA
2023 ART tour INTERNATIONAL Magazine Spring Issue
2022 ARTISTS IN THE WORLD Selected Artists, Rome, Italy
2021 MOONLIGHT SONATAS for Beethoven International Artworks and Poems, 2021 Germany
2020 50 WOMEN SCULPTORS, England
2013 ARTS AND LETTER HAMILTON, A NEGOTIATION OF MEMORY BY Shirley Madill
2009 SCULPTURE BY THE SEA Bondi, Australia
2008 FOCUS ON LINCOLN BY Joanne McDonald, “A Woman of steel” with images
2007 HAMILTON MAGAZINE by Tor Lukasik-Foss, essay with images
2007 WEST NIAGARA NEWS by Terry McNamee, essay with image
2006 NIGHT & DAY, USA Marija Vukcevich, “Sculptor “steels” the show at Lewiston gallery”
2006 NIAGARA THIS WEEK, Shella Gardezi “ Lincoln artist “Gems” from steel.
2006 PULS, Laura Hollik, “Heavy Clothes” (with image)
2006 CATALOGUE, Kathryn Hogg, “Heavy Metal” Essay with images.
2006 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo “Steel and Stone” with images
2005 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Elaine Hujer “Steel Sculptor wins top prize” with images.
2005 AN GIANG'S MARK, the Second International Symposium AnGian catalogue
2004 THUA THIEN HUE, Vietnam, News Paper, write-up with picture
2003 CATALOGUE DANTE EUROPE, XIV Biennale Internazionale Dantesca
2003 CATALOGUE Presence & Absence, Crawford Arts Centre & University of Sunderland, UK
2001 MATSUMOTO NEWS, Japan Interview
2000 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo “Grimsby sculptor to spend month in Japan”
2000 DOFASCO ILLUSTRATED NEWS Jane Gordon- Marianne Reim Steel Sculptor
1999 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo "Of wombs and tombs” with images.
1997 MATRIART, CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART MAGAZINE Special Issue Dr. Marion Hare - Marianne Reim Sculptor for the twenty-first century
1997 NOW MAGAZINE TORONTOS WEEKLY NEWS AND ENTERTMNT. VOICE Nathalie-Roze Fischer-Sculptor Society shakes up new waves
1997 THE GRIMSBY INDEPENDENT Sensitivity melded into stone and steel
1996 SÜDWEST PRESSE-SCHWÄBISCHE DONAU ZEITUNG, Germany Otfried Käppeler- Stahl ist das zentrale Thema (with photo)
1996 THE HALIBURTON COUNTY ECHO Dr. Marion Hare Artists teaching Artists
1996 DEFINING THE SITE (Studio visit & book) by Margaret Rodgers (with photo)
1995 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Jeff Mahoney- Dream catcher (with photo)
1995 HOMEGROWN NIAGARA ARTS AND LITERATURE MAGAZINE (Cover Story) Lynn Burgess-Dazzling art with the strength of steel
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS:
Public & Private, National & International and Canadian Government
GRANTS:
Ontario Arts Council: numerous exhibition assistance grants, one Creation/Production grant 1998, Travel Grant 2009
SELECTED AWARDS:
Certificate of Appreciation, Work included in the collection of Yu Kyung Art Museum, Geoje, South Korea
Le Prix Petrovest Group Award Society of Canadian Artists Best in Show Award
Certificate of Honour, Kunming China
Certificate of Honour, Hue Vietnam
ELECTED MEMBER: Sculpture Society of Canada - Society of Canadian Artists - Ontario Society of Artists
TV / VIDEOS:
2007 NIAGARA CABLE TV, Interview at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery “Dialogue”
2006 CTV, CKCO News, Kitchener, live interview with Kyle Christie
1999 CABLE 14, Hamilton, Ont. Opening at the Art Gallery of Hamilton From the Inaudible
1998 GRIMSBY CABLE 12, Artists in the Gardens (Studio Tour)
1991 GRIMSBY CABLE 12, Lincoln Library Art Gallery Solo Exhibition, Painting and Sculptures by Marianne Reim
Marianne Reim's art is like a spiritual visual poesis. Experiencing her work is like traveling through a mysterious world of hidden messages and inscriptions that are to be decoded like sacred archaeological finds, where we would discover the true meaning to our existence. Through a synthesis of text and image, she offers verbal visual messages that have symbolic reference to history and life experience. Reim has been making book sculptures constructed of steel and stone for the over 10 years. The book works combine elements of architecture, sculpture and the written word. As viewers, we attempt to find meaning by reading and mentally peeling away the layers to get at the core of the work. It is a process of discovery and making sense of the world around us. Reim encourages us to slow down, think and deconstruct the information she relays and come to a reason as to why it affects us. Language is the place where she begins.
As children where we are situated socially is constructed by our language. It is the cement that binds and maintains the social world of experience. Reim`s objects remain close to the familiar and everyday, yet their corporeal functions are highly suggestive. Reim has selected to make these objects manually, by her own hand, cutting and burning words into hard materials such as steel. The materials she uses suggest muteness, a paradox, for within the inscribed words and signs, the language base, lie silent speechless objects. Through this work, Marianne Reim gives communal meaning to our existence.
Through the use of a welding instrument, Reim has inscribed religious texts such as The Lord’s Prayer in various languages including her native language, German. These sculptures evoke a medieval scriptorium similar to sacred books where religious figurs or monks would labouriously copy texts from history. Reim’s books usually follow a chronology with each book representing a pivotal passage in her life. However the personal is transcended and her books become a metaphor for the a “Book of Life” wherein all of humankind’s history is enscribed. As Reim states about her work, “ the specific forms of my work float on the surface of a well of memory. I create discreet objects, objects in series and installation. My preferred material is steel. In my constructions the material wears its identity through rough cut edges, visible welds and an undisguised slabness. I may combine them with wire, stone, text and miscellaneous findings. By cutting, burning and welding, experience, memory and emotion are melded into steel.
Her recent major project titled BURNT OFFERING (THE ENTIRE ISAIAH SCROLL) BURNT OFFERING takes on the challenge of inscribing the entire text of the Dead Sea Scrolls on large plates of steel. Between 1947 and 1956 thousands of fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents were discovered in eleven caves near the site of Khirbet Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea. These important texts have revolutionized our understanding of the way the Bible was transmitted, and have illuminated the general cultural and religious background of ancient Palestine, out of which both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity arose. Large in scale, Reim’s installation consists of 87 (2.0m x .50m) plates of steel joined together in the form of open pages. Grouped together fitting within a room, viewers are immersed inside the steel pages where reading becomes a physical experience.
Reim’s sculpture uses a physical language to arrive at form and message. The process involved in its making is inseparable from its content. Attracted to objects that have stored histories there is a kind of alchemy at work in her process. Meaning and form come together in her work and the meaning is embedded in the material of steel as well as its form. Reim looks for specific proximities that lock in tensions to produce a communication or meaning. When installed, BURNT OFFERING is a dark and lusciously mysterious exhibition. It demands a semi-darkened gallery with spotlights casting dramatic light on the words. Inscribed through fire the wavering texts create a revelatory insight into the nature of form, mass and substance. This sculptural transformation is an attempt to unite material and form in a complete economy of substance. This was the point of entry for her agenda of transcendental materiality, the aspiration of form and mass toward an immanent and ideal immateriality. The new scrolls are free of the formative constraints of the world in which they existed as they mark a transformation through another dimensional state. For Reim, steel represents the density of the image, its energy. These plates, in all their indeterminate manifestations, are silhouettes that stand like a Richard Serra sculpture representing an ideal of congruence between the container and the contained. These are discrete objects which, because they equivocate on the verge of identity, radiate an unsettling energy.
BURNT OFFERING becomes a conceptual locus for dialogue with reference and perception precisely because they are from and in the past. Steeped in a somnolent aura, just like the architectural presence of an historical palace or cave, this work is a dramatic tableau of human memory.
The secondary animation in the work comes from the double mnemonic charge enacted by the work itself becoming a memory in the observer. The work elaborates in an expansive, oddly disquieting atmosphere operating like a parallel language. Also, because it is appears so grounded, the message is located and transmitted in a three-dimensional continuum. The walls of steel are pictorial spaces – the surface of the plates burnt with sacred text. Most importantly these works are anti-ontological devices the sole purpose of which is to restlessly subvert the process of perceiving them, categorically or in any way other than a direct, pre-verbal apprehension.
Marieanne Reim’s work cannot be considered theory-based. Her works have consistently proven to be experiential. For her the thinking comes during the making while she is interpreting or inscribing her texts. Her process is dependant on a belief in the veneration of the sub-conscious. In this work she believes that viewers can enter the work if they choose, carrying their own set of reference points, because sub-conscious meaning and symbolism share a collective or universal language, as well as a deeply personal one.
Amidst the socio-politically uncertain times that we live in and the proliferation of free floating images, words, and objects provided by fractured identities and deconstructed discourses of the art world, this work may have an obvious reference yet be open-ended. Over the past 20 years, a thread that has run through Reim’s work has been a focus on transcendence and illumination – of operations that are psychic, abstract and concrete. There have been substantive interconnections in her art-making—from the installation approach to a use of codified information imbued in the work, giving it a talisman-like or poetic quality.
BURN OFFERING is an artistic “translation” of subjectivity on the part of the artist and the viewers’ willingness to travel across the many boundaries (some implicit others explicit) to enter into a new world is significant in understanding the work. As the viewers explore the plurality of aspects of the installation —formal, cognitive and emotional—the apocryphal web of the sources unfold.
This installation is an exploration of gesture in a ritual sense and just like speech gestures can reflect the broader meanings and implications of the ambiguous nature of the relationship between knowledge (personal, social, artistic) and the individual self. Expression in language or art through gestures is the result of deliberate choices culled from privatized codes and “translated” through bodily manifestations such as voice, flesh, and movement. This ambiguity of gesture/speech coupled with the ambiguity of “position” (social, artistic, etc.) in the work of Marianne Reim, i.e. to be inside and outside at the same time, to have steadfastly refused to become disembodied from either matter or the social, makes her art most creative and relevant to our times.
In differing degrees and manner Reim has developed a practice that has operated outside the mainstream theoretical apparatuses yet she has never abandoned her belief in art-making as an intuitive, embodied process, as opposed to merely illustrating the latest theoretical “turn.” In one way or another, she has made art that is a negotiation of memories, tensions, and unfinished business from history. The result is a kind of experimental writing that emphasizes the process—the act of writing itself—and reveals the magical origin of communication by words.
Shirley Madill Executive Director at THE KITCHENER-WATERLOO ART GALLERY
Hamilton 2011
SELECTED REVIEWS, ARTICLES, BOOKS, CATALOGUES:
www.blurb.com A NEGOTIATON OF MEMORIES M. Reim
2024 ART BIENNALE BASEL 2024 MOCAMAG Contemporary Art Museum Switzerland
2024 WOMEN ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD 7th Edition Dubai, UEA
2023 ART tour INTERNATIONAL Magazine Spring Issue
2022 ARTISTS IN THE WORLD Selected Artists, Rome, Italy
2021 MOONLIGHT SONATAS for Beethoven International Artworks and Poems, 2021 Germany
2020 50 WOMEN SCULPTORS, England
2013 ARTS AND LETTER HAMILTON, A NEGOTIATION OF MEMORY BY Shirley Madill
2009 SCULPTURE BY THE SEA Bondi, Australia
2008 FOCUS ON LINCOLN BY Joanne McDonald, “A Woman of steel” with images
2007 HAMILTON MAGAZINE by Tor Lukasik-Foss, essay with images
2007 WEST NIAGARA NEWS by Terry McNamee, essay with image
2006 NIGHT & DAY, USA Marija Vukcevich, “Sculptor “steels” the show at Lewiston gallery”
2006 NIAGARA THIS WEEK, Shella Gardezi “ Lincoln artist “Gems” from steel.
2006 PULS, Laura Hollik, “Heavy Clothes” (with image)
2006 CATALOGUE, Kathryn Hogg, “Heavy Metal” Essay with images.
2006 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo “Steel and Stone” with images
2005 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Elaine Hujer “Steel Sculptor wins top prize” with images.
2005 AN GIANG'S MARK, the Second International Symposium AnGian catalogue
2004 THUA THIEN HUE, Vietnam, News Paper, write-up with picture
2003 CATALOGUE DANTE EUROPE, XIV Biennale Internazionale Dantesca
2003 CATALOGUE Presence & Absence, Crawford Arts Centre & University of Sunderland, UK
2001 MATSUMOTO NEWS, Japan Interview
2000 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo “Grimsby sculptor to spend month in Japan”
2000 DOFASCO ILLUSTRATED NEWS Jane Gordon- Marianne Reim Steel Sculptor
1999 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Regina Haggo "Of wombs and tombs” with images.
1997 MATRIART, CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART MAGAZINE Special Issue Dr. Marion Hare - Marianne Reim Sculptor for the twenty-first century
1997 NOW MAGAZINE TORONTOS WEEKLY NEWS AND ENTERTMNT. VOICE Nathalie-Roze Fischer-Sculptor Society shakes up new waves
1997 THE GRIMSBY INDEPENDENT Sensitivity melded into stone and steel
1996 SÜDWEST PRESSE-SCHWÄBISCHE DONAU ZEITUNG, Germany Otfried Käppeler- Stahl ist das zentrale Thema (with photo)
1996 THE HALIBURTON COUNTY ECHO Dr. Marion Hare Artists teaching Artists
1996 DEFINING THE SITE (Studio visit & book) by Margaret Rodgers (with photo)
1995 THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Jeff Mahoney- Dream catcher (with photo)
1995 HOMEGROWN NIAGARA ARTS AND LITERATURE MAGAZINE (Cover Story) Lynn Burgess-Dazzling art with the strength of steel
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS:
Public & Private, National & International and Canadian Government
GRANTS:
Ontario Arts Council: numerous exhibition assistance grants, one Creation/Production grant 1998, Travel Grant 2009
SELECTED AWARDS:
Certificate of Appreciation, Work included in the collection of Yu Kyung Art Museum, Geoje, South Korea
Le Prix Petrovest Group Award Society of Canadian Artists Best in Show Award
Certificate of Honour, Kunming China
Certificate of Honour, Hue Vietnam
ELECTED MEMBER: Sculpture Society of Canada - Society of Canadian Artists - Ontario Society of Artists
TV / VIDEOS:
2007 NIAGARA CABLE TV, Interview at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery “Dialogue”
2006 CTV, CKCO News, Kitchener, live interview with Kyle Christie
1999 CABLE 14, Hamilton, Ont. Opening at the Art Gallery of Hamilton From the Inaudible
1998 GRIMSBY CABLE 12, Artists in the Gardens (Studio Tour)
1991 GRIMSBY CABLE 12, Lincoln Library Art Gallery Solo Exhibition, Painting and Sculptures by Marianne Reim