Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have been making large-format sculpture, mixed media, installation and electronic art together since 2000. Through a body of work encompassing various formats, Marman and Borins contextualize visual art within everyday life while referring to twentieth century art history. Their projects identify dualities and tensions that arise in the politicization, historicization, and visuality of artwork, often within the context of mass visual language, mass media, consumerism, and the way in which images circulate in the information age. Marman and Borins often express these ideas with ironic, cynical humor and attendant ambiguity.
Always having an eye towards data and development, their oeuvre has a tangibly technologically based component referenced through painting, sculpture, and multimedia. They achieve this through such strategies as pairing styles of post-minimalism and electronic art, and by means of high-art formalism and abstraction, transliterated into popular aesthetics. Marman and Borins also pursue a strategy of formal mutability, in which they define form by subject matter rather than by a recognizable singular visual language.
Much of their work involves large scale commissions, in both the general and museum spheres. Public commissions include Water Guardians at the Water Front Toronto, Dodecadandy for the City of Toronto and Toronto Transit Commissionworks, and Google for The Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. A recent project, Busy Beaver (2022), installed at the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto, references innovation while incorporating iconography native to Canada that symbolizes creativity and nature, while creating an area for congregation and respite from daily academics.
Jennifer Marman was born in 1965 in Canada. She graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1988. Daniel Borins was born in 1974 in Canada. He graduated from McGill University in 1997. The duo met while studying at the Ontario College of Art, which they both received advanced degrees from in 2001. The duo live and work in Toronto, ON, Canada.
Solo exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Ontario (Ontario), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Alberta), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Ontario), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton), and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ). Select group exhibitions include The Power Plant (Toronto), the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (Hong Kong and Shenzhen), and the National Gallery of Canada (Canada). Their work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the City of Toronto, amongst others.