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marian april's bio

Marian April Glebes recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Imaging Media and Digital Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Glebes's thesis, In Defense of Native Soil was an exhibition that questioned specific dichotomies or paradoxes to create ambiguous answers to issues of the suburban environment, the character and power of the artist, and the use of the gallery and the art object as a tool for social change. The thesis exhibition featured dandelions and the remnants of elaborate processes that are futile or ridiculous, metaphoric, and temporary. These remnants which, when installed in the gallery, aimed to embrace ephemeral moments, like the childhood wishing on a dandelion, and examined the elusive core of our fraught relationship with and legacy of the suburban front yard. Glebes's work investigates the consequences and cyclical nature of human interactions with the lawn as the face of the American dream, and the potential of agency in the art object to influence that circumscribed and very established routine.

These works are an attempt to control the uncontrollable. They establish a metaphor regarding cultural and social understandings of the lawn through the use of the commonplace and seemingly benign dandelion. In the thesis, the dandelion is used as an object that is at once subversive, but contains potential proactivity – it is simultaneously humble and monumentalized. These inherent dichotomies are strategically emphasized to symbolically dissect the absurdity and fragility of our received suburban values.