Marina Font (Argentina 1970) studied design, sculpture, and photography at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Martin Malharro, Argentina. She moved to the United States in 1996. She studied photography at Speos Ecole de la Photographie in Paris and earned an MFA in Photography from Barry University, 2009. She has exhibited in numerous one-person and group shows in galleries, cultural institutions, and museums, as well as many private collections throughout the world. Font was recently selected as one of the Top 50 portfolios through Photolucida’s “Critical Mass” review. Her photo-based work explores ideas about identity, memory, gender, territory, language, and the forces of the unconscious. She currently lives and works in Miami Beach. Her work is represented by the Dina Mitrani Gallery.
Marina is also part of two multidisciplinary collaborations: RPM Projects (with Rhonda Mitrani and Patricia Schnall Gutierrez) and Instacorrespondences + 9TOPICS (with Amalia Caputo).She recently partnered with Minor Matters Books and Dina Mitrani Gallery to publish her first monograph “Anatomy is Destiny”, coming out in April 2018.
Mental Maps
Building on my previous series Dark Continents, I have continued to explore metaphorically the complexity of the human psyche and its inner threads in order to further investigate my relationship with the multiple intersecting factors that constitute the female identity, delving into its multiple aspects. The central axis of these very intuitive and visceral works is the approach to the female body perceived mainly through three planes: the biological, the psychological and the social, and the juxtapositions and connections among these themes. In this series, I depart from a black and white photograph of a female body and make of these neutral photographs a canvas for recreating, through the physical labor of sewing, metaphors of the mind’s systematic representation of the world.
My hands intervene each work manually, and through this intimate, performatic ritual, the embodiment of the photograph becomes the common ground where the familiar and the foreign meet, as an individual attempt to blur the lines between the internal and external spaces of the body. The construction of these mental maps evokes diverse psychological states and emotions with meanings that are in constant flux, never fixed, just like our identities.
With this series, I aim to approach what lies beyond control and reason, exploring, through the act of drawing with thread, embroidery, fabric and appropriated crochet pieces onto the photographic surface, the intricate mysteries of the psyche. Through these works I intend to shed imaginary light on the female experience in order to build idealized and fantastical connections to the forces of the unconscious.
To view more of marina font’s work please visit her website.