ABOUT
Marika is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing at Oklahoma State University. She collects illustrations from feminine-coded mid century print ephemera -- such as sewing packets, greeting cards, and recipe books -- which she translates into digital collages and print-based works. She earned her M.F.A in Studio Art from the University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies in 2022, and holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Carleton College. From 2013-2019, she worked as an associate acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press, where she acquired scholarly manuscripts in anthropology and science fiction studies. Her work has recently been exhibited at Skylab Gallery in Columbus, OH, The Parachute Factory in Lexington, KY, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and High Point University's Secrest Gallery.
My work depicts a feminist bio scientific imaginary. I use the lives and behaviors of non-human organisms like fungi and parasites as a jumping off point to invent creatures whose abstracted bodies and biological processes allow me to explore ideas of identity, embodiment, and reproductive labor through a feminist lens. The genesis point of my work is a reverence for and desire to elevate mid century feminine-coded print ephemera: greeting cards, sewing packets, and recipe books - which I use to create digital collages. These materials are reminiscent of the domestic spaces to which they belong and often carry an aura of use in the form of handwritten notes or dog-eared pages. Through a process of repetitive mirroring, images of objects like flowers and aprons acquire an otherworldly quality and become removed from their original context.
My prints, installations and artist books are characterized by a graphic sense of color, pattern, and design. I draw inspiration from the aesthetics of biological life under a microscope, using bilateral symmetry and self-similarity in my compositions. Digital processes allow me to mimic the algorithmic tendencies of nature-as-designer, while printmaking allows me to create multiples with slight, often accidental variations -- the same way that a morphology is expressed differently across members of a species. By situating my works within installation environments, I extend the act of collage to the gallery wall. In this way, I emphasize the materiality of the prints, referencing the body and building a world around them that suggests ideas of parasitism, symbiosis and mutation.
