Colleen Marie is an interdisciplinary artist and video maker. She received her BFA in painting from BU and her MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University. Her work has been exhibited and performed in Boston, Buffalo, New York, Miami, Chicago, and internationally in Italy, Iceland, and France. She is also a member of Thorn Collaborative, an ongoing creative partnership with artist Erin Ethridge.
My process is an affirmation of magic. I define magic in my work as latent or unexpected connections between things. Pursuing and mapping these connections drives my practice.
My understanding of magic comes from myths, fairy tales, science fiction and the natural world, but also from digital tools like Photoshop, After Effects, and Ableton live. Like extensions of our imaginations, these softwares allow me to transfigure and integrate images, rendering them malleable and fluid. Simple opacity effects bring together faraway places, masking helps me fly and touch fire, motion tracking lets me levitate objects. These tools allow me to make apparent what is felt intuitively.
The question I ask myself most often is how relationships alter the identities and meanings of individual elements in my work, and how these altered meanings affect the whole. To this end, I tend to work by gathering bits and pieces– of footage (original or found and altered), animation, poetry, snatches of music and sound– and then arranging and rearranging them, layering and superimposing, searching for where they relate and where there is friction.*
Themes that run throughout my work are the blurring of boundaries between sublime landscape and the body, metamorphosis, unreliable narration, and negative space (sonic, verbal, and visual). Video, with its capacity to encompass a variety of different media, enables this process, allowing me to stitch together a multitude of parts.
*The studio is a place where nothing needs to be solid; no relationships are fixed or hardened. If and when connections and their meanings form, they may also transform.