Marnie Weber’s ghostly
clowns and dancing
animals venture
to the otherworld.
Marnie Weber’s fascinating world of singing flowers, masked mermaids, wise bears, and ghostly clowns walks a fine line between dream and reality. Weber has made a career of weaving together diverse media through the use of surreal narrative, and if each story line is the conceptual glue, costumes are the physical mainstay. A spectacular array of costumes winds through Weber’s multimedia work, appearing in her films, sculptures, videos, collages, performances, and installations.
A former member of the Los Angeles band Party Boys, Weber incorporates music and performance into her art. Since her earliest performance, Of Marnie, Of Rat, Of Caryatids at Rebel Art Gallery in Hollywood (1987), costumes have been central. She recalls, “I only did one performance not in character, and it was such an uncomfortable experience that I thought, ‘I better go in character,’ and it really freed me up.” Freed her up, indeed. In the 20 years since, Weber has developed a highly original and complex body of work where costumes continue to play a vital role, from gallery to theater to screen.
Weber uses thrift store castoffs and basic craft materials like fabric and fur, glitter and glue, and papier-mâché, but the key ingredients are her vivid imagination, sensitivity to character, and eye for possibility. A basketball piñata, child’s animal mask, and jar of modeling paste are put together to become a bear, possum, or bunny. On seeing foam trophy heads in a taxidermy catalog, she thought, “It would be so great to wear those on top of a helmet!” and she figured out how to do it. The resulting totem-like headgear, worn by characters in her 2007 film, A Western Song, encapsulates
Weber’s striking combination of realism and fantasy.
One of the most evocative things about the costumes is how they so effectively transform their wearers, including Weber, who dons them in her live performances, videos, and films. She refers to them not as costumes but as characters. “It’s hard for me to think of them as nonliving things,” she explains. “Even when they’re on a mannequin, they seem to carry a spirit with them, and you get a feeling for the personality, even if it’s not moving.”
The wizened face of the possum is a perfect example, a recurring favorite since its first appearance in her 2001 video, The Forgotten. Its head is made from the combination of two masks — a giraffe and an old woman. More recently, the Dandy Clowns, which began as masks “picked up in a costume shop,” are transformed into expressive faces that feel more like people than masks.
Though they have evolved over the years, from simple to more complex, each character retains a dreamlike sense of fantasy moored in reality, a hallmark of Weber’s work. Earlier characters were made primarily from thrift store finds. For Coquette Circus Girl (1993), Weber wore a drum majorette top and a skirt tinged with Christmas tree tinsel. She carried a child’s blue guitar and impaled herself through a large stuffed pony. As her work progressed, Weber began to make more elaborate costumes, expanding her ingenuity more than her shopping list. In her studio, she is constantly playing, piecing together new combinations, seeing what works, and unearthing a style of crafting as straightforward as her work is otherworldly.
Costuming and crafting came early to Weber,
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