Marlon Griffith (1976,
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) started his artistic practice as a Carnival
designer—a “mas’ man,” as Trinidadians would call him. This background deeply
shapes his work as a contemporary visual artist, which has performative, participatory,
and ephemeral characteristics that derive from Carnival.
This has evolved into a processional+installation practice that
is based upon a reciprocal dialogue between ‘Mas’ (the artistic component of
the Trinidad Carnival) and art as a means of investigating the phenomenological
aspect of the embodied experience: which is situated at the intersection of the
visual and public performance.
His work is manifested through the
engagement and collaboration with various communities, traditions and cultures;
experimenting with fundamental questions in perception, Griffith’s work
interrogates contemporary culture outside the traditional pitfalls of
representation. Operating outside the context of Mas’ Griffith performative
actions are stripped down to their basic form and abstracted to create new
images and narratives that respond critically and poetically to our
socio-cultural environment.
Griffith has been an artist in residence
at Bag Factory / Fordsburg Artists Studios in Johannesburg (2004); Mino Paper
Art Village in Japan (2005); Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts,
Kingston, Jamaica (2007); and Popop Studios, Nassau, The Bahamas (2010-11); and
Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2011). He has shown extensively in North America in
Toronto (South-South: Interruptions & Encounters, 2009); Miami (Global
Caribbean, 2010); Washington (Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean
Interventions, Art Museum of the Americas, 2011); Champaign (Krannert Art
Museum, 2011) and other locations and internationally in Gwangju (7th
Gwanju Biennale, 2008) and Cape Town (CAPE09, 2009) MANIFESTA 9 Parallel
Projects 2012, Hasselt, Belgium, AICHI TRIENNALE 2013, TATE MODERN BMW Tate
Live Series 2014 and the AGYU(Art Gallery of York University) 2015.
In 2010, Marlon was the recipient of a
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and of a Commonwealth Award
