ARTIST STATEMENT

Marsel Reddick is a multi-disciplinary artist with a BFA in Sculpture from the Alberta University of the Arts (Moh'kins'tsis/Calgary) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal). His practice engages with chance, affect, appropriation, and speculative history through a variety of media such as video, sound, zine, performance, and assemblage. He works to examine the ongoing and shifting entanglements between past and present, with a particular interest in selfhood and feminist art historiography. To underscore the tenuousness of canonical histories and conventions of the self, he aims to facilitate experiences that disrupt automatic processes of identification in order to propose alternate modes of being in the world. 

In his work, he seeks to challenge the binaries of self and other by drawing attention to the relational interactions between these ostensibly disparate entities, rather than their assumed differences. Using appropriation to craft speculative histories, he aims to reveal the mythic nature of the histories we take for granted. 

Marsel often draws upon magical and divinatory practices inspired by dada, surrealism, and fluxism, with particular interest in marginalized artists who historically worked within these realms as acts of resistance and survival. In exploring the (non)existence of the self, his practice oscillates between appropriation of art historical phenomena and introspective work based on dreams and desires. As an artist and writer, Marsel focuses on the dissolution of the self and the crafting of speculative histories as sites for transformation.