“A Talisman Painting” received the Mercedes Matter Award for painting, selected by art historian and curator Choghakate Kazarian at the New York Studio School Alumni Exhibition Aug 7-Sept 30 2023.
‘A Talisman Painting’ 2023. Acrylic, pastel, spray paint, West African glass beads and fish vertebrae on linen, 78.5 x 54.5 inches.
Malado Francine is an American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles. Themes around her work include ideas around archaeology and future artifacts, animism, hybrid beings, and the artistic creation of a more empathetic artificial intelligence. A human/animal/tech collaboration. Mythic creatures that blur the lines between the archeological past and the imagined technological future. An attempt to generate a feeling of deep time. The ancient reconfigured as newly totemic. The digital age as future artifact. Future tech as animist.
“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986
Endings are always beginnings. As an ending begins, it nudges our sense of “now”toward some hazy, perpetual future. It’s a future with soft edges. The future rarely arrives abruptly. It’s a slow burn. We are carried into it fluidly while the shades and shapes of reality are altered around us.
This exhibition was an invitation for artists to speculate about the future and the potential worlds that are imagined through present-tense-endings. Artists were asked to think beyond any notion of the apocalyptic and instead reflect on how life will adapt to experiences of a new now, be that political, industrial, ecological, terrestrial, and so on. The response was overwhelmingly vast and varied. That so many artists are toying with these ideas should make us take notice. They are among our most important world-builders…
– Catherine Taft, Deputy Director & Curator at LAXART
Artist-in-Residence in Limassol, Cyprus, October-December 2021
I was invited to participate in the first international MeMeraki residency in the fall of 2021, alongside my graduate school peers Maia Ibar and Todd Bienvenu. Also in attendance was Hannah Rowan, and a stellar roster of local artists who also participated in the final show.
July 10 – September 19 2021 at the KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART
Curated by Yasmeen Siddiqui of Minerva Projects.
The Katonah Museum of Art presents “Cladogram” with works by 58 artists based locally, regionally, and from a diversity of countries, including Argentina, Australia, and Italy. The groundbreaking exhibition received 1,100 submissions by 542 artists from 21 countries.
You can hear an audio file about my work in the show here: KMA on Youtube.
From the artist’s “Lost Tapes” series comes “Creation Scenes,” based on footage misplaced for almost twenty years and recently re-discovered.
Using traditional film techniques like scratching the emulsion with a needle, splicing and taping the film, in combination with newer technology in editing including Ipad drawing and animated Gifs- to create a soft-spoken and evocative short film.
As a young filmmaker in the nineties, the artist would encourage intense performative acts by her friends and lovers in front of VHS and Super 8mm film cameras. Dawn, an ex-girlfriend, and Jesse, the artist’s ex-husband, as an artist in his own right, are subjects in this film.
“Creation Scenes” examines the idea of who is creator and who is the creation: woman birthing man; artist as the hand of ‘God’ -the filmmaker… A meta-narrative of a disembodied artist drawing on himself – as the filmmaker draws on top of him: ”X-ing out her exes’s…”