CHRISTINE MARIE
Christine Marie is an interdisciplinary media artist. She creates artworks, installation, performance, XR, and immersive cinematic spectacles.
While working at the intersection of art and science, Marie is intrinsically tied to ancient forms and the metaphysical exploration of light. She has pioneered live, large-scale, 3D stereo-images for performance with her reinvention of the shadow-stereoscope. The device projects the largest known, real-time, 40’ 3D images into cubic space. Marie uses the term (antiquated) Augmented Reality to describe the analog, anaglyph effect which is comparable to modern-day AR and can only be experienced live or through a VR headset.
Marie seamlessly integrates performers, objects and special effects to elicit connections with concepts, phenomenology, and history in emotional and visually stimulating hybrid-media experiences. In her work, Marie reflects upon industrialization, oppositional forces and the media’s gaze within sensory narratives that examine the role of the feminine in maintaining integrity, beauty and preservation of the natural world.
TED Talk 2012 Long Beach.
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.
Artist talk at Stanford University 2020.
Her original work has appeared at the Sundance Film Festival New Frontier, REDCAT, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, TED, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, The Exploratorium, Pop-Up Magazine, Z Space, the NY International Fringe Festival and Soho House. Theatrical designs at the Geffen Playhouse, and Southcoast Repertory. With support from the MAP Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Paul Dresher Ensemble Artists Residency, Intersection for the Arts, Cal Arts Center for New Performance, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, Jim Henson Foundation, and others.
Christine Marie received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Integrated Media, and Theater. She is the recipient of the 2020 CalArts Alumni Council grant. Marie studied Wayang Kulit in Bali with dalang Pak Nartha. She is a former member ShadowLight Productions.
Christine Marie is a TED Fellow. In Engaging The Unknown, she discusses her artistic process, and tells the story of discovering cinematic shadow theater while working as a video editor.
Select collaborations and consultations include: Monkey Man 360 VR video project with the avante-garde art collective The Residents and Stephane Blanquet. Shadow animation co-design and choreography for The Last Mortal a multimedia performance exploring transhumanism with award-winning German company, Half Past Selber Schuld. Working with artist Jordan Wolfson to teach a robot how to make hand-shadow puppets. Mask design and fabrication for Skinny Puppy's Mythmaker tour.
As an educator, Marie was awarded the Andrew Mellon Arts and Technology Professor of Practice grant for her work at Occidental College. She has taught shadow animation at Pixar University and DreamWorks Studios and has lectured at CalArts and Stanford University. She has taught professional development workshops at Crystal Bridges in conjunction with the University of Arkansas, the Skirball Cultural Center, Columbia Teachers College and other institutions. She is twice certified in Aesthetic Education by the Lincoln Center Institute. During the pandemic, LACMA commissioned her to create Light Story for their education program.
Marie is currently creating a series of 3-D light boxes, optical toys and animations. Her latest project is a collaboration with composer Hil Jaeger, it derives its inspiration from Rachel Carson's final book, The Sense of Wonder.
"Christine Marie is an inventor of analog that intentionally uses the dispersion of shadow to speak silent poems. She makes color that the fortuitous eye absorbs into the body as emotion.
She has the audacity to disrupt light, and to weave a timelessness into its shaped absence, to wordlessly make a story of ambition and migration out of negative space."
Program notes from the premiere of 4 TRAINS at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.