Roman Road is pleased to be returning to Code Art Fair in Copenhagen for the second time, this year with a solo booth by Alix Marie. Stemming from her ongoing investigations into the tactile and performative possibilities of photography, the stand specially features three new bodies of work by the artist, which together also explore the sociocultural idealisation of the body.
Marie’s Olympians (2018) is a new series of photographic works presenting fragmented depictions of muscular body parts. Employing pages from popular bodybuilding magazines, she selects and defines shapes of male bodybuilders’ exposed arms, legs and torsos, and fills in the remaining background with a black marker pen. The works are enclosed in Perspex and sealed using a strong yet flexible rubber tape, mimicking the impression of the pictured bodies and adding tactility to each piece.
Using similar cropped images of male bodybuilders taken from the magazines, Marie has used the dye sublimation printing technique in her new Deep Muscle Massage (2018) and It’s Like Somebody Blowing Air into your Muscle (2018) works to create three-dimensional photographic sculptures. In both series, the images are printed onto satin polyester fabric, which is then affixed around electric massage mats and fans. The Deep Muscle Massage works displayed on the booth have been set to distinct massage programs, generating different sequences of sound and instigating an immersive presentation that audibly brings to mind the repetitive workout regimes that bodybuilders undergo to maintain their desired physiques.