Marina Eckler
Artist Profile: Marina Eckler
The Scenic In-Between
by Paloma Jimenez
The meandering lines and poetic washes of color in Marina Eckler’s work offer an entrance into her arena of paradoxical structures. Feelings of tender uncertainty coexist with confidently defined forms. Working across various media–including drawing, painting, interactive objects, and performance–she constructs a visual language that unearths all the humor and heartbreak in the gentle slope of a mark.
Marina Eckler, Love Helps, 2022, gouache, 10 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Eckler’s life’s path has unwound along a similarly unpredictable path. She was born in Connecticut, but grew up in Southern California where she spent countless hours on the ice rink practicing figure skating. “There are sensory things from the rink that show up in my paintings, like the blurred lines under ice and the spatial relationships of things like bright distant colors.”[1]
After spending some time working in the Bay Area at a coffee shop that “looked like Middle Earth” and playing poker with a group of Vietnam veterans, she enrolled in San Francisco State University (SFSU) to pursue a BA in Studio Art. Eckler found inspiration in the “artists who spent the ‘90s tagging up San Francisco, musicians who made their own shirts, and shy kids who wrote zines, stickers, and posters on the sidewalks[…]artists owned that city more than the owners did.”
In the early 2000’s, Eckler moved with her family to Colorado, finding a new muse in the landscape. She encountered a shift in her visual language when she “started splicing together the Rocky Mountains, San Francisco fog, palm trees, smog, colors from the ice rink, and traces of the military presence here, hidden underground and in the sky.” Eckler went on to receive an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design in 2013 and currently lives in Colorado Springs where she teaches Visual Art at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
Her major influences include poetry and the work of other artists who probe the formal and conceptual qualities of language. “Art is conversational for me,” she reflects; it operates as a way to exchange thoughts with peers and contribute to a longer history of artistic movements. Eckler continues and expands upon the explorations of artists such as Raymond Pettibon, Yoko Ono, Lawrence Weiner, Agnes Denes, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America sparked her interest in sparse language and the specificity of a singular moment.
Marina Eckler, Or Or Or, 2022, gouache, 4 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
In Eckler’s gouache paintings, casually confident splotches of color hold space for rumination on the liminal space between what we say and what we mean to say. Or Or Or repeats the word “OR” until it becomes an object; the O is a letter, a container, a soft rock squishing under gravity’s influence. Saturated pools stack into a precarious cairn that marks a dubious path forward. The painting exemplifies how abstract language often precedes any concrete action. Throughout her art practice, words and disparate letters work together to provide scaffolding for the hazier nature of human existence.
Marina Eckler, Mouth to Mouth, 2020, acrylic and beeswax on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
At SFSU, Eckler explored letterpress printing, which introduced her “to the pictorial aspect of language.” This graphic clarity stands at the forefront in her Mouth to Mouth series, where thickly-applied blocks of color spell out the phrase in a potentially endless loop of repetition. The studied hues bring to mind the banal specificity of a CPR chart hanging in an outdated workplace. Gaping O’s become breathing mouths, communicating the immediacy of losing a heartbeat and the intimate precision required to resuscitate a life. Love Helps, with its keyboard key nails, uses phonetic mirroring to capture this recurrent theme of physical urgency. The dark lines of the hands form a fragile, yet vital, union.
Marina Eckler, Naive Meander, 2022, gouache, 4 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Eckler inhabits a collector’s mentality for the various emotive capabilities of a line, and her shapes operate under their own gravitational rules, eschewing traditional logic for expressive flexibility. “Figure drawing [during undergraduate studies] made me aware of gesture and how subtle differences in line can either bring something to life or kill it.” Naive Meander consists of an undulating line that starts out in a deep indigo and releases itself into cerulean lightness with a resounding “ooh.” The line, dotted with points of light and blurred shapes, resembles the experience of quickly moving past fixed objects. If you give into the sensation, the most minute points of contact between colors are cause for celebration.
Marina Eckler, Standard Fortune, 2023, gouache and pencil, 33 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Instability reigns; lines reach out towards the void and sentences remain unfinished. The specificity of Eckler’s visual poetry follows no pre-existing order, but does display an almost scientific curiosity about language that enters the realm of pataphysical investigation. As Alfred Jarry explained, “Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular…Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one.” [2]
Eckler consistently examines particular instances of the quotidian and how they might reveal larger truths, often using the visual language of mapmaking, charts, and graphs to test impossible hypotheses. Standard Fortune tackles the possibility of uncovering one’s future through palmistry charts. The intertwining wrinkles on the sienna palm transform into converging highways of fragmented narratives. It is an honest portrait of an artist processing life through her hands.
Marina Eckler, The Contextual Self, 2020, acrylic, rubber bands, and hardware on wood board, 20 x 24 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Eckler’s trio of interactive pinball structures also comes from a desire to give form to complex emotional experiences. Following a personal loss, The Contextual Self was conceived of as a “three-part grief cycle in the form of a game.” Nails, multicolored rubber bands, and strips of wood informally delineate the boundaries of the game, which are always subject to change. A void looms large in the center of the “Loss” board and the guiding constellations in the night sky have been obfuscated.
By the time you reach “The Contextual Self,” the voids become a smaller part of the larger experience. Eckler explains that the dissolution of self helps to defeat grief’s dominance: “If you zoom out far enough, you can glimpse [...] the curvature of earth, and you can know for sure you’re somewhere on it.” The ball reloads for another round.
Marina Eckler, Untitled (one place at one time), 2022, gouache, 10 x 14 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Many of Eckler’s paintings demonstrate this expansive perspective. Distant lights serve as guiding beacons and sporadic stars fill the darkness. Through a murky gray background spotted with flecks of color, Untitled (one place at one time) delivers a phrase that is simple enough in theory, but always difficult to fully realize. The letters struggle to maintain a consistent shape and occasionally morph into shadows; their edges want to expand outside of legible confines. Being in one place at one time requires embodied presence and enthusiastic surrender to the present.
The ephemerality of a passing thought finds a home in Marina Eckler’s free falling compositions. She employs repetition, witty word play, and nomadic lines towards unpredictable outcomes, where colors dictate the mood and emotion carries conceptual weight. Eckler dives into the pitfalls of language and comes out with a sack full of glimmering gems.
Paloma Jimenez (she/her) is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has been featured in international publications. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from Parsons School of Design.
[1] All quotes come from my virtual interview with Marina Eckler on April 22, 2023.
[2] Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1996).
