Marie Losier: Arrière-train fantôme

Everything Marie Losier films, edits, photographs, draws, sculpts, dreams, says, sews, unsews, undoes or patches together is likewise made of joy and catastrophe: catastrophe makes joy strange, unsettling and dangerous, while joy transforms catastrophe into its own milk, butter and sugar.

Marie Losier shoots and makes holes, using the camera as a punch. She holes time, reality, her own nightmares—everything. She turns death inside out like a glove, then returns to childhood—capricious and cruel, sovereign and crowned. She shoots imagination and attention, as well as that hell of a lot of record sleeves gleaned from garage sales.

Paradoxically, she immortalises her tribe, laying them down forever as derisory, sensual and princely figures, accompanied by fetish objects and unconventional obsessions. Her friends, lovers, companions, chosen brothers and sisters have long been transformed by her into film icons, fairy-tale characters and pharaoh-tramps, heroes of a homemade mythology. Now she engraves them directly onto the skin, dressing them in strange, horrific, tender and reversible tattoos.

It must be recognised just how profoundly Marie Losier’s art is an act of blind faith in friendship. Her friends, lovers, companions and chosen brothers and sisters—living or dead, dying or soon to be—form her court of miracles and her Noah’s Ark. They are her subjects, her objects, the living material of her magic tricks and her merry-go-round.