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Maria Marshall,
President Bill Clinton, Memphis, Tennessee, November 13, 1993,
2000.
Color video projection with sound, continuous loop.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council, 2002.
2002.27.
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Maria Marshall's (b. 1966, Bombay) deftly produced videos can provoke mixed emotions. The London–based artist uses her own children as subjects for her work, digitally manipulating their actions to create psychologically harrowing scenarios. One notable piece from 1998 shows her two–year–old son taking a drag from a cigarette, an uneasy illusion created by the combination of footage of the child playing with a toy cigarette and images of adults smoking along with other computerized effects. In President Bill Clinton, Memphis, Tennessee, November 13, 1993 (2000), we listen to one of her boys read a speech given by the former president on that date espousing the disciplined loving parental structure and its positive impact on society. His too-young voice highlights the artificiality of the words while the video shows both boys unwrapping gloriously red-wrapped Christmas packages on a continuous, speeded-up loop. In this, like Marshall's other videos, the tension between innocence and encroaching adult reality is rendered with an anxious emotional clarity.
—Meghan Dailey
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