Visual Marginalia: Marina Zurkow’s Immortal Trash

• Artist Statement
• Elena Glasberg

Marina Zurkow is a media artist who works with and within systems to build new systems. Beginning her career as a digital animator, Zurkow has flowed through and colonized sculptural, video, conceptual, linguistic, solo-installation, collectivist-activist, and bio forms of art practice. Visiting her studio, one is struck by the vivacious and tenacious objects that comprise her manufactory: books, computer screens and storage equipment, video displays, printed images tacked up, models, plastic figurines, moldering painted canvases, and shaped mycelium spores. From her earliest digital image-sound animations, Zurkow was drawn to create abstract patterns both beautiful and purposefully annoying enough to drill into your senses, while her abject-heroic biomorphic figures clung impossibly to the edges of propriety, and of life proper. Zurkow’s universe of perverse cartoons eventually began to meld with the strange parts and cast-offs of the global ecosystem as it continually shreds and dies off and remakes itself under the pressures of irreversible anthropogenic change. Over the years, as her installations and vision have expanded in ambition and reach, the once-abject cartoons and sketches (as in sketchy, not to be totally trusted) were squirreled away in files and forgotten. Now they are gathered and dispersed—parts of no part—as a wordless visual essay.

The visuals were selected by Zurkow and the editors of Survival, and further selected by the editors of WSQ. Their placement on the page is a result of random processes and layers of selection that include the Feminist Press art department. The appearance of these parts of parts, digital ghosts, and leftovers of a coding and assembling process have been collectively dis/organized.

The Visual Marginalia comes together through the shared concerns of those involved in Survival and in feminist publishing practices in general. And yet an ineluctable force emanates from the visuals themselves—perhaps they placed themselves to a certain extent, landed where they willed, working their cute, exaggerated, and strange appearance to hook the human eye or to clump together, as dandelion seeds adhere lightly to each other before they disperse to other adherences, not the least of which may be the retinas of yet-unknown readers.

Copyright © 2016 Marina Zurkow and Elena Glasberg