MARSHALL, Stephanie

Public Service Performance: STILL
time and location TBA

This work asks the viewer to reflect and question their relationship and attitude toward the ritualized behaviour of wearing a brassiere. Is it an object of comfort, repression, desirability? Brassiere’s are interwoven with the complicated relationship one has to their breasts—as objects, something to decorate, wrap, conceal, celebrate, love, loathe. I want to invite the viewer to feel a little less restricted both mentally and physically.

To take a little time to try something new, simple—step outside of the everyday, take a risk, to play, and breathe differently.

The other main component of the work is laundering, drying, packaging, and returning the collected brassieres. This public service work has its roots in providing an act of kindness. While engaging the viewer in real ways and activating the space in a dynamic interplay of collecting, washing and hanging to dry these private narratives.

Stephanie Marshall is a Toronto-based artist and educator. Her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, performance, design, public art, textile works, curatorial and community-based projects. She has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites in Canada, United States and the United Kingdom. Her interest in green spaces, textiles, architecture, the history of objects, shifting perspectives, community, collecting, and playing with language inform her art practice.

Step 2
Wednesday August 14 noon – 3 pm
Kensington Market

Come find KinesTHESES artists in residence Stephanie Marshall and Sakiko Yamaoka as they engage in a kinesthetic dialogue together. In lieu of an artist talk, the two will communicate with each other and a local public of passersby through a series of spontaneous street actions.

For more information on this project and extensive documentation, see the KinesTHESES Digital Toolkit:
12. A negotiated interaction: Step 2 by Stephanie Marshall and Sakiko Yamaoka (Description, digital photos and video recordings)

Untitled
Saturday November 4 12 pm – 5 pm
Zsa Zsa, 962 Queen St W

Curated by S. Higgins & W. A. Davison as part of StrangeWays—Currents of the Fantastic in Contemporary Performance

For this untitled performance, Stefanie Marshall transformed the Zsa Zsa storefront gallery into an alchemist’s workshop. Using earthy, pungent materials including clay, molasses, urine, human hair and rags, Marshall toiled away over a smoking cauldron, fashioning misshapen dolls and totems to place on clay beds around a table set with teacups. Themes of transformation and illusion are played out in Marshall’s work through ritualized actions and gestures with bizarre, obsessive and occult overtones.

Stefanie Marshall is a Toronto artist working in two and three-dimensional mediums, performance and installation. Throughout the ’90s Stefanie performed and exhibited her work regularly both locally and internationally. She was an invited artist at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival in 1996 and 1997 and was recently included in the prestigious New Contemporaries ’99 show in London, England.

untitled
Thursday, August 7 8 pm – 1 am
Symptom Hall | 160 Claremont St (just south of Dundas St W, west of Bathurst St)

Presented by FADO as part of FIVE HOLES: Touched

Stefanie Marshall uses personal ritual with an emphasis on sensual elements to reveal the vastness of our interior emotional and psychological terrain. In her work she reanimates the cast-offs of our personal histories — old clothes; sticky, greasy, smelly foods; abandoned architecture; forgotten rhymes — and in so doing resurrects the lingering sorrow and sublime that inhabit them.