The Brooklyn Rail

Marie Watt: Singing Everything

Hundreds of chorusing voices, hands, and stories crest across Singing Everything, the second solo show at Marc Straus by Portland-based interdisciplinary and multicultural artist Marie Watt. For twenty-five years, Watt has collaged and sculpted blankets into layered wall hangings and towers that deconstruct the household object’s symbolism within her own diverse German-Scot and Seneca heritage—and the grander scale of the human life cycle. We’re born on blankets, bond with them as teething children and slumbering adults, and die wrapped in them, if we’re lucky.