Marlon Griffith

Marlon Griffith started his artistic practice as a Carnival designer—a “mas’ man,” as Trinidadians would call them. This background deeply shapes his work as a contemporary visual artist, which has performative, participatory,and ephemeral characteristics that derive from the carnival. His work is based on a reciprocal dialogue between ‘mas’ (the artistic component of the Trinidad Carnival) and art as a means of investigating the phenomenological aspect of the embodied experience: it is situated at the intersection of visual and public performance. Experimenting with fundamental questions in perception, his work interrogates contemporary culture outside the traditional pitfalls of representation. Operating outside the context of ’mas’, these performative actions are stripped down to their basic form and abstracted to create new images and narratives that respond critically and poetically to our socio-cultural environment.