StandardVision Artist Showcase: Reframing the Medusa Myth with Mieke Marple

StandardVision continues its curated site-specific art program on the large-scale curved exterior display at 3rd Street Crossing with a month-long showcase of work from visual artist Mieke Marple’s Medusa Collection on view March 1st through 31st.

Consisting of 2,500 generative art NFTs based on Marple’s paintings of canonical Italian sculptures of Medusa, circa 1545 to 1805, the Medusa Collection was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which reframes the myth of Medusa and raises questions on who is really the monster within the tale. Inspired by Marple’s interests in the intersection of mythology, power, and commerce through a feminist, social-emotional lens, the collection aims to give back to the community by allocating 25% of sales to the education non-profit TeachRock.org.

Marple started making physical Medusa paintings based on canonical Italian sculptures of Medusa in the summer of 2019 which were exhibited in her “Bad Feminist” solo show at Ever Gold Projects San Francisco that year. For the subsequent generative NFT collection, Marple employed ten different variables for each Medusa head including head type, skin color, background, and more. Fourteen of the 2500 are also hand-designed by Marple and not created by the algorithm. With Marple’s partnership with TeachRock, she aims for The Medusa Collection to reframe the Medusa myth on a global scale by advocating for updates to problematic school curricula.

Marple has been written about by The New York Times, W Magazine, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Autre, among other publications. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Ever Gold [Projects] in SF and 1301PE in LA. Through various charity art auctions, she has helped raise over a million dollars for Planned Parenthood LA and a quarter million for prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance. Marple was also co-owner of Night Gallery, Los Angeles, 2011-2016.

Catch pieces from Marple’s Medusa Collection on view at the large-scale exterior media facade on 3rd Street Crossing, and learn more about her on her Instagram.