Biography

Marnie Blair received a BFA from Lakehead University and an MFA from the University of Calgary, Canada.   She has studied at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, the Studio Art Centers International in Florence and has interned at Manhattan’s Lower East Side Print Shop.  She has worked as The Print and Paper Facilitator at The Banff Centre and currently teaches printmaking at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada.  Blair has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Exhibition

Terminal Work
Marnie Blair works primarily in printmaking and installation with a focus upon embodiment, medicine, technology, and architecture. Her artwork is strongly informed by her experience of surviving a cardiac arrest at the age of nineteen. At that time she was diagnosed with Long Q T Syndrome, a condition that affects the heart’s electrical system, which led to the implantation of a cardiac defibrillator. She is now on her third defibrillator, the second of which was recalled due to a faulty battery. Blair’s work explores the intersections between fragility and resilience; the biological and the artificial; private and public; decay and resuscitation; and the body and architecture. She is particularly interested in how one’s sense of embodiment and identity become profoundly affected by illness, diagnosis, and recovery. Her prints and installations interrogate what it means to be dependent upon a mechanical device for survival, to inhabit a cyborg-like existence as part human/part machine. These questions are not only personally relevant but can also be applied to the current transformation of human existence due to our increasing reliance upon many different types of technologies.

She mixes process-based methods of making with objects found in derelict industrial and medical sites such as grain terminals, power stations, and hospitals. For example, her installation 365 Liminalities 2012 combines materials found in an abandoned hospital and power station outside of Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada (mannequin legs, wallpaper, piston casings, circular power charts, a wooden spool) with screen prints and collage works. The amalgamation of found and hand made materials in Blair’s work resonates with her own experience as being both biological and artificial. She is particularly attracted to using oxidized metals and industrial found objects due to their association with decay and uselessness and how they can become transformed through art making. This way of working also addresses the ways that identity can be enhanced or infringed upon by technologies, architectural structures, and institutions.