Marina Roy, Mineral Intelligence | 2010 | 10min | HD | Canada
Mineral Intelligence charts the flow of material life. Setting out from the mineral and cellular levels, and moving on to cultural production and myth, the film focuses on the encounter between “nature” and “culture” and how human and natural life interpenetrate one another.
The video is divided into three parts. In the first few minutes pigment flows through water, corresponding to a narrative (voice-over) description of the origins of life spoken by Graham Meisner. In the second part, footage of jellyfish swimming through the water corresponds to a description of the human symbolic realm, and how humans come to interact with the materials around them to create new entities within the world as extensions of themselves. The final section of video footage is of a cathedral exterior peppered with sparrows. This corresponds to a narrative of the life of Saint Denis, patron saint of France. Saint Denis’ story relates to our fascination with rebellion against sovereign authority, but also how the “biologically impossible” relates to dreams of immortality and salvation (living despite the fragmentation of the body). Saint Denis’ story is the creation of a nationalist symbol: the birth of France in opposition to Roman colonial dominance, but his story also foreshadows revolutionary terror (decapitation). The importance of decapitation in French history comes full circle at the site of Saint Denis basilica, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, two of the very last of the royals, buried there before France became a republic and empire.
Thursday June 23 8:30pm
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Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist who works across a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, animation, sculpture, and writing. She has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, the UK, Europe and India. Incorporating raw and found materials, image and text, her work strives to create an allegorical language that lays bare the ideological structures that bind us. The foundations of her research are in psychoanalysis, biopolitics, human-animal distinction, linguistics, and art history. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award, British Columbia’s largest visual art award. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp), an encyclopedic book which revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings in Western culture. She is associate professor in visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, at the University of British Columbia.
