By Invitation Only: Lynne Marsh on her upcoming exhibition in LA and the career advice she would give her younger self
Head down to council_st next week to see Lynne's work in person!
Welcome to by invitation only, a series of Q&As that gives readers a rare behind-the-curtain look into the lives, interests, and perspectives of creative professionals shaping the art world today.
Introducing our next guest: Lynne Marsh
bio:
Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist, based in Los Angeles, whose practice explores the politics and poetics of image-making through mediation, technology, and production. Her work investigates the infrastructures of spectacle, capturing offstage spaces and the unseen labour that shapes cultural and theatrical experiences. Her work foregrounds the camera as a performative agent, revealing the mechanics behind image construction and reframing social space as a kind of theatre. These themes will be further explored in her upcoming solo exhibition Standing Death Backward at council_st, Los Angeles (June 7–July 5, 2025), and in the forthcoming book She Moves Me: Performance, Moving Image, and Lynne Marsh’s Lens, edited by Sylvie Fortin, to be published later this year.
Marsh holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2001 to 2016, she lived and worked in London and Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including UCR ARTS (Riverside, CA), Berlinische Galerie, ICA London, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and featured in biennials and festivals such as La Biennale de Montréal and the Istanbul Biennial. She is currently Associate Professor in the Art Department at UC Riverside, and her work is held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
You can find Lynne in all of the following places:
Follow Lynne on Instagram @lynnemarz
Explore Lynne’s work on her website
Find out more about Lynne’s upcoming exhibition at council_st
Pre-order Lynne’s book here
Thank you to Lynne for her amazing answers!
Let’s dive in…
You have an exhibition opening next weekend in Los Angeles, could you tell us a little more about it?
Yes! The exhibition is titled Standing Death Backward. It opens at council_st, a project space in Los Angeles, and runs from June 7th to July 5th. I’ll be presenting an installation of three life-size figurative sculptures, each milled using a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine from digital scans of real-life performers.
It’s a show about violence and gravity—about the violence of capture, the deficiencies of rendering, and the infrastructural failures that underpin digital life. The figures—blocky and approximate—are toppled over, pressing against the wall and collapsing onto the floor, as if gravity returned the moment they fell out of the software.
In recent years, I’ve been working with volumetric capture, scanning performers’ bodies to create 3D avatars that I then re-film in virtual space to produce video works. For this new body of work, I experimented with Mixamo, an online platform commonly used in video game production. It houses a library of motion-capture animations and uses machine learning to automatically rig a digital skeleton and apply those animations to 3D character models. I upload my scanned performers—frozen in T-poses—and assign them pre-set mocaps with names like Shoved Reaction with Spin or Sprint Backward. The digital body then enacts the motion like a puppet.
The overtones of violence in the gesture library are pervasive and inescapably embedded. The animated figures—distorted by algorithmic approximation—took on a fragile, hand-formed materiality, reminiscent of clay or Plasticine, and rendered in the software’s default neutral gray. I found their vulnerability haunting and felt compelled to give them a physical presence. I selected single frames from animations titled Standing Death Backward, Corkscrew Evade, an Floating, and produced each as a life-size sculpture.
This work continues my ongoing interest in gesture—and in what happens when technology allows gestures to be captured, archived, commodified, and reinserted into the physical world.
Looking back, what career advice would you give your younger self?
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