Margeaux Walter

In this series, I am focusing on simple modifications of the landscape through subtle hand-made interventions. The slow degradation of environments is not always noticeable until it’s too late, and it is this subtlety that I am interested in. To create these works, I have been photographing micro sections of the landscape, printing them onto fabric, and then sewing them into outfits and drapery. I then use my body in conversation with the landscape covered in these prints to form simple, targeted, visual interventions.

For example, in “My Other Half” (first image), I encountered this rock that seemed as if it was broken in half. By recreating its other half through my fabric intervention, I was able to make it whole again, if even for a fleeting moment.

In these images I am staging site-specific interventions in the landscape that when seen through a camera lens disrupt the landscape much like a glitch in the image. I see the Anthropocene age as a glitch in time; it is so short in the greater timeline of life, and yet has caused so much havoc. In my performative photographs, this glitch can be seen as a pixel, a cubicle, or a portal, yet there is a glimpse of the humanity that is both camouflaged into the land and completely disconnected from it. I use my own body and sets I build in dialogue with the landscape to create these images. In doing so, I am able to experience both a deep connection with the land and at the same time a disconnect. I see an inherent cultural disassociation with the environment as directly linked to climate change; i.e. the glitch.

Greenery is a site specific image installed on an interpretation board in Pasadena, CA, and created nearby. Thinking about a disconnection with our environments in relation to climate change denial, I am constructing site-specific scenes that when seen through a camera lens disrupt the landscape much like a glitch in the image. This glitch could be seen as a pixel, a cubicle, or a portal, yet there is a glimpse of human life that is both camouflaged into the land yet completely disconnected from it. Read on an interpretation board, the glitch creates moment of pause, allowing people passing by to think about their own interference in the landscape.

An exploration created in quarantine. These images reflect a human desire to connect with nature, and the failure of that connection with the influence of commerce, consumerism, lifestyle and comfort. Due to Covid-19, we have become even more isolated from nature, from each other, and from the world, multiplying some of these emotions.

‘Believe Me’, named after Trump’s most frequently used two-word phrase, is a series of photographs resembling surveillance images that one might find in Google Earth. Mimicking augmented realities, I am staging site-specific temporary installations in the environment that challenge our current post-fact world influenced by scripted and hyperbolic reality television, fake news, sensational journalism and virtual experiences. Thinking about the increasing effect of plastic on our environments, ecosystems, oceans, animal life, and health, many of these images focus on consumer culture, climate change denial, and the elusive ways these topics are portrayed throughout various media outlets. By performing the characters in each scene and giving control over to a drone, I become a puppet in the process, flipping the relationship between photographer and subject as well as referencing contemporary surveillance practices. The nature of this type of extreme aerial imagery and how it’s used (for Google Maps, drone strikes, breaking news and policing), creates a certainty for the viewer and a validation of authenticity. A God’s-eye view taken at face value.

What started as an exercise to free my mind, much like a painter would do a drawing a day, has turned into an obsession. The moon is something we take for granted and is rarely visible through city lights. When it is visible, it is impossible to photograph, many times resulting in a tiny spec of light on a blurry dark image. The moon represents the core of our life-cycles and solar system, which we are actively tampering with, albeit indirectly. This series is an ode to the moon, each image the size of a postcard that all together create a mass of consumer products. These images are only the beginning.

Each image in this series is a physical domestic scene that is then deconstructed through color and pattern into varying levels of chaos and order, obscuring the identities of the figures within them. For each piece I seek to form a dialogue with modernist painting – to flatten space, camouflage elements, and transform daily routines and moments into abstract shapes. Using staged environments, studio lighting, and saturated color, I reference familiar visual cues of advertising that are embedded in our collective unconscious.

Pic-a-Picnic aerial photo booth for Family Day at the Brooklyn Museum, January 2020

Eddy’s Place, HD video, 2:32 min, 2016

In these lenticular works, each piece is comprised of two images, which shift as a viewer passes in front of it.  The first image shows a stereotypical scene that transforms into a psychological or dream-like interpretation of it.

In this public billboard project sponsored by 14x48.org, I chose the slogan, Keep Calm and Carry On because its history addresses the overlap between individuality and commerce as well as the various guises of advertising and propaganda. Originating in the British Stationary Office during WWII as war propaganda, the slogan is now commonly used in advertising and everyday dialogue.

The photographs from this body of work reveal a subject that has been consumed and camouflaged by objects and materials around them, creating a new sort of Where’s Waldo scene.

This video tells a day in the life of a woman that I saw in the Ikea showrooms, hanging in various frames, surrounded by different children and pets.  No matter where she was hanging, she represented the generic or ideal mother, wife, and middle-class woman.  The antagonist in this film, I also met at Ikea.  Famnig Hjärta (translated as embrace-y heart), a cuddly red heart pillow with arms, is Ikea’s number one seller of all their products.  Drawing from classic horror film language, this video is a psychological drama about anxiety around identity, consumerism, and the value we place on objects. 

A destroyed room reassembles itself into an Ikea style showroom through a series of 1200 stop-motion photographs. This piece explores America’s relationship to disaster as mediated through commerce and the news. Time and order are both turned upside-down mirroring how the news disorients events, creating a new history. Siri narrates the progression through a series of real estate euphemisms.

This performance transforms with each iteration, as it is adapted to the site-specific landscape, allowing the performers to disappear and reappear into the environment. By simulating nature in these costumed figures, I draw attention to the human footprint and growing disconnect between the environment and contemporary consumer lifestyle. The costumed nature performers (birch tree, pine tree, boulder, grass to name a few) act as avatars for the environment, drawing people in to experience the scenery in an interactive, visceral and playful way.

By camouflaging myself into the environment, I question my own invisibility in the context of digital culture. In Elemental, the costumes are all created from synthetic renditions of natural materials inhibiting me from fitting in completely.

Simulating nature using machine made materials also addresses the human footprint and growing disconnect between the environment and contemporary consumer lifestyle.

A silent film about a day in the park, inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

These works memorialize the laughable moments and unspoken flaws of modern American life.  Drawing on personal experiences and stories, I am forming an intimate exploration of daily life on a social, familial, and personal level.  With the accessibility of mobile devices, we are constantly surrounded by TMI, too much information, which many times gets in the way of everyday moments and interactions. 

Jīn was created in Beijing, China and was inspired by the transient nature of the architecture there. The government can demolish property at will to make room for the newer, more modern, sterile architecture shown in many of these images. Each window reveals tidbits of humanity like grass sprouting in the cracks of a paved parking lot.  There is a sharp contrast between the organic and inorganic, which is both exposed and masked by rapid modernization. This is the face of progress.

Inspired by the rivalry, comradery and constant struggle for individuality that emerges in the presence of a large group of people, I have recreated familiar crowded scenarios—a graduation ceremony, ballgame, concert, cocktail party etc. Performing all the different characters and clichés in these photographs and lenticulars, I am interested in highlighting a sense of isolation that emerges in crowds, as well as the conflicting attempts to stand out and disappear at the same time.

Inspired by the notion of a cubicle, these 3D and motion lenticular based modular sculptures are near life-size. As viewers pass by the work, the interactions and missed connections between characters reveal themselves.

This series of photographs shows people unified by dress in a moment of pause or waiting. These images explore strained human interactions and distant moments in environments where we are forced to be physically close to one another.

These minimalist portraits imitate gestures and expressions one might see in everyday interactions. By using lenticulars, the viewer is able to see two gestures in one image, revealing a missed connection or accidental eye contact. Through these portraits, I am exploring the discomforts that exist around physical interactions and communication, which seem to be increasing alongside technology.

Discord takes place in a world depleted by technological dependence.  I am exploring the dichotomy between the raw, desolate nature of the landscapes and the pristine attributes of technology.  Using a character that can be seen as human or machine, these images reveal a narrative of the subjects path through a barren landscape, left with only a faint memory of her past life.  Her dress is made from cables and plugs.

Inspired by the structure of assembly lines, I created a series of lenticulars reflecting the monotony, loneliness and mechanical routine of everyday life in a digital age. There is a rebel in each piece, representing a struggle to hold onto individuality in a changing world.