On June 29th. 2015, I was awarded the 2015-2016 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship from The Department of Cultural Affairs.
Funding supported work on (In)/Animate Objects, a performative installation I created for the 2016 COLA Fellowship Exhibition at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
In the installation, a mountain of decaying rag dolls towers to the ceiling, upon which their maker, the grandmother, presides from the throne of her wingback chair.
“Life is nothing if you’re not obsessed,” claimed the cult filmmaker John Waters. I imagine he would find a kindred spirit in the visual and performance artist Marsian De Lellis, whose handmade spectacles memorialize obsessional lives. Drawing inspiration from the offbeat characters whose private manias become public fodder for tabloids, talk shows, and reality television, De Lellis’s creations are the hybrid offspring of fact and fiction, [their] productions equal parts art, performance, and object lesson on polymorphous perversity. (More)
Allison de Fren
PRESS RELEASE
Los Angeles – The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), and the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation (BAPF) are pleased to present the 2016 City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artists Fellowships. The program’s visual arts exhibition will be on view at DCA’s Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery located at 4800 Hollywood Boulevard in Barnsdall Park, from May 15 through July 3, 2016, with an opening reception on May 15, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The C.O.L.A. Literary reading will be held on June 11 at 7:00 p.m. at Grand Performances.
Awarded annually by DCA, the C.O.L.A. Fellowships support the creation
of new works by a selection of the City’s most exemplary mid-career artists. The C.O.L.A. exhibition honors these creative visionaries and nurtures the symbiotic relationship between LA, its artists, its history, and its identity as an international arts capital.Chosen by a team of experts, the 2016 C.O.L.A. award recipients in the visual arts include: Paolo Davanzo, Marsian De Lellis, Keiko Fukazawa, Megan Geckler, Won Ju Lim, Blue McRight, Sandeep Mukherjee, Christine Nguyen, and Jim Skuldt. The 2016 C.O.L.A. award recipients in literature are Sarah Maclay, Claudia Rodriguez, and Lynne Thompson. Each artist will present new work created specifically for C.O.L.A. with a $10,000 grant awarded by DCA.
The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
