Interface is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Canada-based installation artist, Jenine Marsh. Marsh’s exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned text by Bay Area author, Claudia La Rocco.

Marsh’s sculptural work re-imagines corporeal experience as an embodiment of surfaces of contact. Familiar objects and simple deformations feel out alternatively tactile modes of agency and exchange at the body’s periphery. For Interface, Marsh will present a new sculptural installation continuing her recent explorations with train-pressed coins. Marsh considers the flattening and destruction of coins as not only an anti-capitalist sculptural act, but also as a potentially feminist, transformative gesture, producing alternative modes of value and exchange which are tactile, embodied and personal.

La Rocco works with found language and collage. Mucking around with and in between genres, she often recycles and misuses her own writings, playing with juxtaposition and accident. She is interested in edges and textures: the materiality of words and grammar. She views her piece for this exhibition, entitled “Two-Page Collection,” as a kind of collage or modular poem made up of some new writing and some quotes from previously written pieces. It consists of “stand-alone” sentences and phrases that are nonetheless existing in relation to each other and can fit into any order, depending on the reader. The sentences will be cut up and presented in an envelope rather than in a specific order on a printed page. While not writing specifically about Marsh’s work, it did inform some of the writing. Marsh in turn selected the title for the show from a line in La Rocco’s “collection.”

This exhibition marks the beginning of a series at Interface pairing its exhibitions with newly commissioned writings by Bay Area writers. The writings and the exhibitions are viewed as independent but are designed to complement one another.

The following text is adapted from coins and tokens by Jenine Marsh:

I press the coins with a machine that cuts through cities and continents like a rusty knife. An unbelievably long and narrow machine-press, it forks and grinds its way across land, unwavering from its stubborn route, locked in steel. The machine is sometimes fenced in with chain-link and barbed wire, sometimes bordered by the blank backsides of warehouses, and sometimes left wide open like an ugly and unhealing scar, dirty, and smelling of train oil and dry grass.

I lay out heavy pocketfuls of coins in a long row along the rail and wait. Sometimes I’ll wait hours, sitting on the slag with a beer and the insects feasting on dandelion and milkweed. The weight will come on slowly with deep underground tones that send me back to the tall grass. The engine comes, huge, with a blast of wind and the incredible cacophony of closed cars rattling like they might shake apart and wheels hammering down on rail joints, screaming metal-on-metal. There is an extra noise when wheels that could cut a truck in two roll over the shallow thickness of dimes and quarters and cents. Endless cars hammer through the strip, and then it passes, taking its noise with it. The crickets come back on and I search the rocks for the scattered and flattened coins, still warm and dirty with train oil.

The ambiguous legality of the trespass, the mis-use of the privately owned machine, and the destruction of legal tender enacted along these weed strips together stretch out an illicit liminality. Destruction makes a space. And although it is narrow, unbelievably thin, is it there. A gap in the fence.

Jenine Marsh is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. Recent exhibitions include Entangled Tales, Rupert (Vilnius), Orientering with Entrée (Bergen), Occupations of Uninhabited Space, Gianni Manhattan (Vienna), How deep is your love?, Cooper Cole (Toronto), feminine marvelous and tough, Lulu (Mexico City), TRUE LIES, Night Gallery (Los Angeles), GUTTERSNIPES, Vie d'ange (Montreal), In a world of weeds, all roses are wild, Beautiful (Chicago), A Change of Heart, Hannah Hoffman Gallery (Los Angeles), and The cut flower still blooms, 8-11 (Toronto). She has participated in residencies at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet (NO), Rupert (LT), the Banff Centre (CA), and Vermont Studio Center (USA). Her work is represented by Cooper Cole in Toronto.

Claudia La Rocco is the author of the selected writings The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited) and the novel petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory Theater). animals & giraffes, her duo with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and an ongoing roster of collaborators, has released two albums: July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records) and Landlocked Beach (with Wobbly; Creative Sources). Her poetry and prose have been published in 6X6 #34: I Like Softness (Ugly Duckling Presse), Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Daniel Sack, ed; Routledge), On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed; Triple Canopy), et al. She has received grants and residencies from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts, among others, and has bylines in numerous publications, including ARTFORUM, BOMB, and The New York Times, where she was a critic from 2005-2015.