PARKFIELD STUDIES

Marianna Christofides’s solo exhibition "Parkfield Studies" featuring a selection of recent moving-image works taken from a considerably more extensive research and work complex is based on a journey made by the artist along the San Andreas Fault. Interested in the impact of processes in the Earth’s interior on life forms living on the surface, she followed the course of the fault from north to south, past Parkfield and numerous other places and explored the stories from the Earth’s geological history that are inscribed on its rock layers. One of them is examined in the 3-channel slide projection about buildings in Los Angeles and Tokyo designed in the 1920s by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (A canary called Cassandra, 2017). Not only architects designing the earth such as Wright and Bruno Taut can be found in Christofides’s immersive pictorial world encompassing archival material and documentary footage but also numerous travel encounters whose existence are closely associated with "natural" disasters and their symptoms: a latent state of helplessness, of inner insecurity and sense of threat regarding everything that is capable of disturbing seemingly stable and unchangeable aspects of a world order.