Marina Sachs has been working under the name SHADE since 2021. A self-taught artist, they have always used anything they can get their hands on to make work. Scrappy, speculative, and informed by their lived experiences through addiction and sobriety, SHADE’s work is about revealing what’s missing through showing partial evidence.
Marina’s practice doesn’t end where their life begins; they photograph the people and places they live next to and within. Marina photographs primarily in 35mm color and B/W film, and, since 2021, present their images unframed and stapled to the wall. Preciousness is always called into question, especially in Marina’s installation straegies; every photographic print is destroyed through de-installation. When working digitally, their images are created through the screenshot or digital cameras from the early aughts. Vestigiality, compression, and finding one’s “real” self through digital compression are some of the pirimary themes of their digital works. They are currently working on series where they physically re-place their younger selves in photographs. The simulacra/simulation relationship is explored here, as well as considerations of the power dynamics propping up photography as they relate to the child-parent relationship and consent.
Their sculptural, painted, and dimensional works primarily investigate this other-world first introduced in their thesis installation IF NOTHING CHANGES. Posing as a hyper-saturated, animated reality (think Rick and Morty meets Ren and Stimpy), this world is camouflaged and sinister. It’s a world where spills seep and checkerboards go on forever; it’s the world of addiction. With repeated iconography of beds, doors, devices, and headless, genderless figures, this world is a siren song of science fiction, intersectional feminism, and non-medical ways of seeing addiction. THE FEEDBACK LOOP, a 72-deck of cards created for IF NOTHING CHANGES, was the first repetitive vision of this other world.
Marina’s practice is also community-driven; they have co-created projects with marginalized communities, such as Lakota Youth Speak (2015-2019) and SOBER BABY (2021-). Lakota Youth Speak built community programming with Indigenous teenagers in La Plant on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. SOBER BABY offered an intimate, virtual space for discussions about sobriety adn addiction as they intersect with gender, race, and existing models of recovery. SOBER BABY is on pause for 2024. Archived shows can be watched or listened to on IGTV and Spotify.
