Marian McMahon

Marian McMahon was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1954. She was a filmmaker, curator and scholar, whose contribution to Canadian critical film and video practice had a substantial impact on contemporary art discourse in Canada creating a dialogue for women's experiences, interlacing personal and shared subjectivities to examine the dominant framework of the Canadian nationhood and history. Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon, an exhibition assembled at the Art Gallery of Windsor in the winter of 2014 by curator Srimoyee Mitra and Philip Hoffman, aims to pay homage to the work of an artist who - during her short-lived career due to her early death in 1996 - bridged multiple boundaries through her life working between caregiving (she worked as a registered nurse from 1974 to 1984) and making art, academia and film, photography and text. She received her Phd posthumously, from the University of Toronto (OISE - Ontario Institute of Studies in Education) in 2000.

Watch a selection of Marion's films on vimeo -
https://vimeo.com/channels/879409/videos

Marian's Doctorate thesis and final film RACHING HOME was unfinished at the time of her death. Her partner, experimental filmmaker Phil Hoffman, has revisited themes of loss, memory and identity in RACHING HOME through the footage she originally shot on 8mm and 16mm film in the early 1990's. After several iterations of the film, Hoffman was finally able to "complete" it using the Korsakow system. The result is a nonlinear, poetic reflection on Marian's original themes of identity through his own lens and personal sense of loss and memory of Marian.

Please visit the following websites for more information about this project:
www.racinghome.ca
http://korsakow.org/racing-home/