TIME OUT NEW YORK, April 26- May 3, 2001~Ana Honigman

MARNIE WEBER
“Who’s the Most Forgotten of Them All”
Fredericks Freiser Gallery

In her two previous solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles-based Marnie Weber created surreal videos and collages in which she combined clippings from pornographic magazines with fairy-tale creatures. The works were smart and witty, if also deeply indebted to familiar criticisms of traditional “happily ever after” gender scenarios by such feminist writers as Anne Sexton and Anne Rice.
For her third outing, Weber’s approach seems to have become more mature and complex in its formulations. The work here- a video installation, a large-scale photographic collage and a group of costumed mannequins- revolved around the story of a princess trapped in limbo. The video (which is housed inside an iridescent plastic castle) shows the princess as she watches a pack of cursed animals who inhabit a grotto beneath her castle. Half human and half animal, each of these creatures is as shiny, pastel and comical as a My Little Pony doll; they are clearly lost should, as isolates in their absurdity as the princess in her room.

The creaturely costumes seem in the video are also displayed on mannequins in the gallery and seem both artificial and poignantly expressive. Constructed out of basic materials in cheerful colorsm the outfits are all the more tender for the humanity they impart. Bt the entrance, a homely pregnant bunny her breast adorned with butterflies, her foot wedged in a concrete block, opens her mouth as if she were about to complain about something. Nearby, a warthog poses like a self righteous magistrate; above him, ties to a pole, a somber possum lowers his head like a repentant criminal.

Weber’s creatures are powerfully empathic because they are humanly flawed, taking viewers back to the sense of awe and personal identification they felt with the characters in children’s stories. And the show is bewitching as the artist captures the polar emotions of such fantasies: enchantment and entrapment.