Autofiction
Marsha Balian
Transmission Gallery
January 16 - March 1, 2025
Sweet and disarming, the coy smiles and friendly but frequently distant eyes that greet viewers in Marsha Balian’s body of work stare out from their small wooden panels. With their mismatched features and improbable bodies, born of decades of collected ephemera, it is easy—and in fact important— to project a narrative of your own onto the figures. Balian’s “hope is that the viewer can access whatever stories it conjures for them,” and “Autofiction,” on view now at Transmission Gallery, offers a multitude of opportunities for just that sort of storytelling.
Though titled, and featuring a hefty portion of portraiture-focused works, Balian left the exhibit intentionally vague, with no “specific theme,” just the goal of experimentation, to “let the work tell me where it wanted to go.”
Off it went.
Details of “I Should Have Thought It Through“ and “Mr. And Mrs. Ginsburg”
Caught between historical truths, as shown through posed photographs, family portraits, foreign language newspapers, sewing guides, mail, maps, and money, and constructed ones, as created through the alteration, obfuscation, or simple arrangement of those artifacts, the collages share a new reality, one of endless possibilities. Are the subjects representative of the artist and her histories? Or are they entirely fictional, people of the present or future made of pieces of the past?
Complex and layered, made anew, with common threads stringing together many works; Balian’s hand is a strong one, her signature stamped in each eye, each set of pursed lips, each layer of media expertly and delicately perched atop the last. Cindy Sherman’s fisheyed face echoed before my eyes, the gently warped reality of Balian’s creations feeling a natural progression, existing only a few steps beyond Sherman’s altered photographs.
Detail of “Calculations with Fido” and “The Puppet Speaks for Me”
Each piece carries a thousand possible stories, each face and rune and squiggle and brushstroke a chance at a new story, a different world. Jaunty hats, a man-cat, a giant-cannibal breast plate, a mouth of letters; every detail that draws you in digs at deeper meaning then stops short, shunting your attention off elsewhere. Perfectly juxtaposed oddities, their precise interactions of typeface and human visages, unravel known meanings and reconstruct into new ones.
“Locked Out of the Castle”
A rusted oil can, poised atop colorfully painted and collaged blocks, simultaneously invokes the simplicity of children’s building blocks and the fantastical buildings of Muscovite and Revivalist Russian architecture. “Locked Out of the Castle,” the sole piece displayed on a pedestal instead of mounted to the walls of the gallery, provided a particularly multidimensional and thoroughly entrancing world to enter. Joyful colors in clean geometric shapes support more detailed and somber elements, a mangled alphabet borders a disembodied hand, sheet music the backdrop of a town. And atop them all, a tiny queen of spades reigns, her gown split in a curtsy, her crown jaunty, the hint of a hip exposed, cheeky.
“Regardless of what our work depicts, or how it is represented, we are in a sense telling the story of our selves,” Balian writes. I wonder what my interest in this miniature queen of the castle might mean.
An artist's reception will be held Saturday, January 25th, 1-4pm.
Artists' Talk with Mac Mechem Saturday, February 22nd, starting at 2 pm.
Check out Agustín Maes’ open studios review from December 2024 for a peek at more of Balian’s work and process.
