Riting: Jane Pickett on Marsian De Lellis
I was fresh off interviewing a guy running for California State Assembly as an independent when I reached out to Marsian De Lellis. Having grown weary of team-based politics… all the red versus blue, D versus R… and increasingly itchy about how to best engage with politics as an artist, I snagged a few extra cameras from fellow filmmakers, audition lights from my downstairs actor neighbor, and sound gear from an installation artist to investigate what it means to drop party affiliation and whether or not this candidate stood at the forefront of a rising tide of independents. Coming from narrative storytelling, doc-style interviewing was new to me and with a trunk full of gear, it seemed only right to extend my investigation into the unflinchingly independent vision of Marsian De Lellis – an artist whose work consistently disrupts and defies oversimplifIed notions of good and bad, right and wrong.
I interviewed Marsian at their apartment amidst a well organized stack of neon fur and a heap of maimed Raggedy Anne-like dolls. The dolls really hit home as a popular girl in middle school use to call me “Raggedy Annnnnne…” with a kind of condescending affection you give towards something you hold dear for one moment, then toss aside. Hung on the wall, Marsian had a close up photo of one of the doll’s wrecked faces with a fly creeping across its eye, hammering in a sense of its neglect and decomposition. There was something so riveting about the desperation in those eyes and how Marsian took one of the most classic hold-close American dolls and reframed it into a position of violent assault and dismissal. There was a profound sense of innocence lost to it that felt bravely poignant and painful in light of the #metoo movement and all the ugly that’s come to light in the wake of our country electing Trump.
In advance of the LAX Festival we asked Riting.org to partner with us in profiling the twelve pieces in the festival. Marsian’s performance, OBJECT OF HER AFFECTION, opened on September 27th, 2018, at Automata in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs till October 13th. Details can be found here.
Riting is an experiment in writing that engages with performance happening now in Los Angeles. Riting is a ground for encounters between artists, their critical community, and the public they belong to. Riting brings together a multiplicity of bodies and a polyphony of voices. Riting supposes there is no definitive untangling. Riting assumes mutuality of investment in the ecology of performance activity in this city.
