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Gallery Artist: Xander Marro
about the artist
Xander Marro (American b. 1975) is a fake scientist/olde style tinker based out of the Dirt Palace; a feminist cupcake encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket river (which is to say in Providence, RI USA).
Dina Deitsch, Curator of Contemporary Art at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum writes: “Marro is an artist, community activist, performer and filmmaker ‘steeped in the underground’ of Providence, RI. As co-founder of the Dirt Palace, a feminist art collective, Marro is equally diverse in her artistic practices. Her work ranges from printmaking to puppetry to performance to film animation and installation and is loosely gathered under a distinctive sensibility that has been described as “a blend of girly Victorian dreaming, Monty Python cartoons, Russian onion domes, beehive hairdos, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Barbarella, and Dr. Seuss” (Greg Cook, Boston Pheonix) Marro’s work is generally low-tech and handmade and embedded with a community of collective art-making. Typically using arcane pieces of visual culture to create strange and fantastic worlds, this almost Luddite approach presents an alternative to today’s fast-paced media-driven environments."
Her adventures underground have included curating and touring with the "Movies with Live Soundtracks" film series and performing in various theatrick/musical formats as one of the variety of her alter egos (Madame Von Temper Tantrum, Lady Long Arms, Lil Blood-n-Guts, Madame Von Malt Liquor etc.) She has also played the part of “business lady” at various posts including as the Managing Director of the epic and revolutionary Art Space AS220 where she crafted endless spreadsheets and reports documenting the possibility of an organized egalitarian approach to art making as a transmutative tool in generating beauty, achieving equality, next level human consciousness and putting a final an end to humanity’s terrible habit of endless war making.