Claudia Marseille: Engrams at Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley

CLAUDIA MARSEILLE : engrams

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CLAUDIA MARSEILLE : engrams engrams en·grams (ěn’grāmz’) n traces of history written on the brain

essay by James Linnehan

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CLAUDIA MARSEILLE : engrams Exhibition Dates April 2 - April 30, 2014 Reception for the Artist: Saturday, April 5, 6 to 8 PM Essay by James Linnehan Photography Credit: Kate Cameron Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 23 Sunnyside Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 415-384-8288 art@seagergray.com All rights reserved

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Chronicling What’s Here, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 50 1/2 x 50 1/2”

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A Version of the Story, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 20 x 20�

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CLAUDIA MARSEILLE : engrams In a certain sense, the artist is someone who animates, renders alive the material he uses.

Giuseppe Penone, artist

The photographer Gregory Crewdson said in an interview, “every artist has a single story to tell.” In the context of the interview, in the film Brief Encounter, he means each artist’s life work is imbued with their individual story. Outside of this context I see another possible reading-- that all artists tell the same story; the single story that is the human one. In a sense, art throughout time constitutes one large story, the story of all of us.

The encaustic medium of “in burned” beeswax and pigment [encaustic, adjective, from Latin encausticus, from Greek enkaustikos, from enkaiein to burn in, from en- + kaiein to burn] dates back to at least the 1st century CE, already described in Book 35 of Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” written in 77-79CE. Some evidence of encaustic painting practice in the Crimea probably dates to the 4th century BCE. It is a practice which originated in ancient Egypt for the sealing and waterproofing of ships and naturally developed into decorative practices to go along with the practical… another human story. Passing from Egypt to Greece to Rome, the encaustic process reaches perfection with the well-known Fayum funeral portraits of ancient Rome. At an ancient Roman site in St. Medard, France, encaustic painting tools belonging to a long absent female artist were discovered in 1895.

Since I have known Claudia Marseille, encaustic has been her chosen medium. It seems a radical break from her previous artistic medium, black and

white photography, with an emphasis on the portrait photograph no less. But like the encaustic medium, photography captures and preserves time; in fact the finest Roman Fayum mummy portraits were made while the subject was living. Lynda Benglis, another important artist of our time, referred to her own work in encaustic as “a mummified version of painting…something buried with a dimension that isn’t quite perceived at first glance.” This medium employs a substance so pure, beeswax, that it is the required material for church candles, whose burning symbolizes the death of Christ and the wax his purity. Beeswax is precious, it is unique, it is not cost effective…bees must produce 8 pounds of honey and fly a collective equivalent of six times around the earth for every pound of wax they make.

Claudia Marseille has arrived at the medium necessary for her full expression as an artist. This is the most essential arrival in an artist’s career, regardless of when it happens. For the “single story to be told” the “medium must fit the message.” Until there is the perfect alchemical marriage between idea and act, the artwork itself will be impure, imprecise. Claudia needs wax and all its relation to liquid and solid, flame and heat, opacity and transparency and translucency, to thickness and thinness. Beeswax holds, captures and returns light; it buries, reveals, conceals, evokes; it takes the qualities of the things it touches and returns them integrated and fused and made new—yet still there somehow, as they were known before the wax and heat.

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Our Human Story, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panel 36 x 36�

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right: Impressions of Rajasthan, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 63 x 13�

It cannot be an unnecessary element in Claudia’s development as an artist that one of her graduate degrees is in Archaeology. Every painting is simultaneously an excavation and a presentation of what is found. Her current grid composite paintings are not unlike the grid maps of archaeological dig sites, ordering the random history of the urban streets Claudia photographs and integrates into her paintings. The wax provides a transitional, literal, effective, material representation of time and process-- the entire sequence of first existence, gradual loss, uncovering, recovering, burying-- and the potential to finally surface again, or remain just below, or return.

In Claudia’s paintings another aspect of our shared, single story is ever present: our entire history and relationship to color is encoded in these paintings. There is an understanding of color beyond that which can be taught or theorized. It is simply the knowing of color; color as it knows itself. Color is vibrational, like sound, and I believe these paintings have sound as well—they can be heard and listened to. Writing, buried images of places and people and things, all echo through the wax and layers and translucency, floating to the surface, scratched into escape, aligned with color, soft and quiet and full of story.

Engrams: traces of history written on the brain. As with archaeology and photography, it can’t be an unnecessary element in this alchemy of painted surface, color and sound, that Claudia is an accomplished classical pianist, with lifelong training in music, coupled with a lifelong hearing impairment. I personally think the presence of sound in these paintings is essential to consider. Here it is also interesting to think of the early recordings of voice and music, made on beeswax cylinders in the 19th century, still able to be played today-- sounds surfacing from the wax, from the vibrations of sound engraved in them. One hundred years later a vibrational moment reoccurs, a moment of our shared story, surfacing from the wax. Much like a painting by Claudia Marseille.

James Linnehan, visual researcher, 2014

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Chelsea, NY., 2013

mixed media encaustic on panel 30 x 40�

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right: Dreaming of August, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 38 x 38�

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left: Richmond, CA, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 50 1/2” x 50 1/2”

Please Don’t Forget Me, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panel 20 x 20”

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Dreaming of Paths not Taken, 2014 mixed media encaustic on panel 36 x 36�

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right: Flora and Fauna, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 38 x 38�

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It’s Not a Coincidence, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 20 x 20”

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right: Phantasm, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 42 x 35”

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Still Here After All This Time, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 13 x 38�

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right: Tracery, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 36 x 30�

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left: Engram, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 42 x 35”

I Can’t Quite Remember, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 16 x 16”

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Triangles, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panel 24 x 24�

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Reverie, 2013

mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 13 x 38�

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Synchronicity, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 16 x 16�

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Palimpsest, 2014

mixed media encaustic on panel 46 x 54�

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CLAUDIA MARSEILLE EDUCATION

2000 MFA in Painting. John F. Kennedy Univ., Orinda, CA

1994-96 California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland CA

1975 MA Pre-Columbian Archaeology,

Institute of Archaeology, London

1972 BA Anthropology/Archaeology.

University of California, Berkeley, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 Engrams, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 2012 Journeys, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 2010 Surface Depths, Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael, CA 2008 New Paintings: 2007-2008, Donna Seager Gallery,

San Rafael, CA 2006 Unearthing Color, Donna Seager Gallery,

San Rafael, CA 2005 Archaeology of Color, Contemporary Fine Art Gallery,

San Anselmo, CA 2004 Passage of Time, Contemporary Fine Art Gallery,

San Anselmo, CA

2003 New Works in Oil and Encaustic, The Club at the

Claremont Hotel, Berkeley, CA Springfever - Recent Paintings, 50 Fremont Street,

San Francisco, CA

Recent Paintings in Oil and Encaustic,

Merced College Art Gallery, Merced, CA

2002 Encaustic Paintings, 1078 Gallery, Chico, CA

Recent Paintings, 455 Market Street,

San Francisco, CA

2001 Recent Encaustic Paintings, Runyon, Saltzman and

Einhorn, Sacramento, CA

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2013 artMRKT, International Art Fair, San Francisco, CA

2012 Inaugural Exhibition, Gallery 65, McLean, VA

2012 Aqua Art Miami, International Art Fair, Miami, FL

2011 Aqua Art Miami, International Art Fair, Miami, FL

Alumni Exhibition, 3 person show,

JFK University Gallery, Berkeley CA

Inaugural Exhibition, Seager Gray Gallery,

Mill Valley, CA

2010 Aqua Art Miami, International Art Fair, Miami, FL

2009 Alumni Exhibition 2009, John F. Kennedy University

Gallery, Berkeley, CA

2007 Flow Art Fair Miami / December 6-9

(Exhibited by Donna Seager Gallery)

2005 Grand Opening Exhibition, Donna Seager Gallery,

San Rafael, CA

2004 Contemporary Abstracts, Alameda Art Center, Alameda, CA

Jack London Square Art Program, Oakland, CA

2003 2003 National Juried Exhibition,

Artisans, Mill Valley, CA, 2nd prize 26

Juried Annual 2002-2003 Show, Pro Arts, Oakland, CA

Annual Member’s Showcase, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA

2002 18th Annual Juried Show, Gallery Route One,

Point Reyes, CA

40th Annual Regional Juried Art Show, Fairfield Visual

Arts Association, Fairfield, CA; 1st and 3rd prize for

painting, and Juror’s award

Recent Paintings, Matrix Gallery, Sacramento, CA

Recent Works, Mad River Post, Corporate offices,

San Francisco, CA

2001 Recent Paintings, Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento, CA

Alumni Exhibition 2001, John F. Kennedy University

Gallery, Berkeley, CA

Arts On Fire 5, Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica, CA, Merit award

Bay Area Art IV, Napa Valley College Gallery, CA

CloseUpClose, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, CA

Secrets, Artisans, Mill Valley, CA

Annual Members’ Showcase, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA

2’x2’ Annual Exhibition, John F. Kennedy University

Gallery, Berkeley, CA

2000 California Small Works 12th Annual Exhibition,

Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, Santa Rosa, CA

Bold Expressions, Sacramento Fine Arts Center, Carmichael, CA

1999 69th Annual Statewide Exhibit, Santa Cruz Art League,

Santa Cruz, CA

Beyond the Garden Gate, Artisans, Mill Valley, CA

From A Woman’s Perspective, San Francisco Women

Artists’ Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Merit Award

In Our Gardens: Flora and Fauna, Danville Fine Arts

Gallery, Danville, CA

Annual Members’ Showcase, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA

1998 Cornucopia, San Francisco Women Artists’ Gallery,

San Francisco, CA, Merit Award

L’eau, San Francisco Women Artists’ Gallery,

San Francisco, CA, Merit Award The Child Within, San Francisco Women Artists’

Gallery, San Francisco, CA

New Beginnings, San Francisco Women Artists’

Gallery, San Francisco, CA

CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Runyon, Saltzman and Einhorn, Sacramento, CA

Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA

Barakat Consulting, Inc. San Francisco, CA

Fredericks Consultants, Santa Rosa, CA

Law Firm of David Birka-White, San Francisco, CA

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Claudia Marseille, Chelsea, N.Y., 30 x 40”, mixed media encaustic on panel, 2013 Front: Dreaming of August, 38 x 38”, mixed media encaustic on panels, mounted on aluminum 2013

engrams en·grams (ěn’grāmz’) n traces of history written on the brain

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