REFUSE is a word that refers not only to what we discard, but also to defiant acts that can catalyze change. These images blend experimental and documentary techniques to reshape our understanding of the landscape and labor of trash-pickers.
Effaced 2011
Effaced explores the metaphor of searching and drowning as it relates to body, voice and text. Source material includes a news story of witnesses to a military slaughter of civilians as “the people fled”.
Expurgation 2008
Expurgate: To cleanse of something morally harmfull, offensive or erroneous; especially: to expunge objectionable parts from before publication or presentation. (Miriam Webster Dictionary)
Photos that explore the experience of loss in the erasure of information and dissolution of identity. Source materials include newspapers, images and narrative stories.
Downrush 2007
Downrush relies on the viewer’s complicity and passivity as witness to current events, conflicts, war, genocide and the associated loss of lives. In Downrush, a body wrapped in burial cloth rolls down the full length of a wooden stairway.
Orpheus X (Battle) 2006
48″ by 43″
Photos from video and set design for the American Repertory Theatre production
Leg 2005
A leg is stretched along the length of exposed tree root. The downed tree trunk and leg are both coated in grey clay, matched in shape, color and form.
Gnaw 2005
A face buried in dry dirt eats its way to the surface.
Detritus 2004
A projected nude figure crouches amidst the turbulence of demolition. U-shaped steel channels frame the deteriorating urban landscape. The jaws of a crane grab at the body stirring up clouds of dust and debris. Unaffected by the surrounding danger, the woman persists as rubble rains down upon her.
FOR EARLIER WORK BY DENISE MARIKA VISIT : : : THE ARCHIVE
