Essay by Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, CA
The restless metabolism of Marcie Begleiter’s Chimera: the Future of Nature series presents nature as haunted by its own spectral persistence, vibrating with the erratic, somatic rhythm of a world refusing its own extinction.
In the kinetic evolution of her studio practice she leverages her background in cinematic set-building to construct meticulously layered dioramas that recall and embody the earnestly surrealist natural world outside her door. She photographs and animates these foraged artifacts; the charred bark, salt-etched debris and volcanic rocks serve as the material DNA of the project, highlighting a psychic gap between the silent, brittle material and the lush animations vibrating on the surrounding walls.
Her 2025 animated film “Kyushu Triad” uses the raw, organic materials of earth and volcanic remains from Japan’s majestic Mount Aso and reanimates them through an in camera alchemy that utilizes the 17-syllable architecture of the haiku as inspiration: a literal prompt for software protocols, translating biological debris and foraged specimens into mutant transmissions from the planet’s collective subconscious. Similarly, the short animations “Chimera Haiku” and “Vanitas” are constructed out of the artist’s own site responsive and eco-emotional experiences of Oregon’s Salmon River estuary and the sere high desert of Summer Lake on the edge of the Great Basin.
Within the exhibition space, five large-scale monitors and a wall-sized photograph surround a sculptural vitrine that hums with the taxonomical energy of a Natural History Museum, while remaining firmly rooted in a contemporary cultural lexicon. Positioned at a child’s eye level of 42 inches, the display case demands a specific somatic submission from the adult viewer, who must lean over and peer down into a collection of ceramics, specimens, and "main characters" staged with the uncanny stillness of a reliquary. They exist in a state of suspended animation that feels both scientific and ritualistic.
The artist’s material obsession manifests in a multidimensional, multi-platform feedback loop by placing the tangible acquisitions from her forays into nature alongside their cinematic translations. Begleiter grounds her speculative modality in the phenomenological reality of a world that is always already re-inventing itself—and will carry on doing so long after we are gone.