Marina Zurkow: Oceans Like Us

Oceans Like Us is a custom software-driven animation series by artist Marina Zurkow that explores the ocean and its inhabitants as a fractal and ever-moving repository of reflections and projections, while considering how our actions have affected ocean life. The title of the series—composed of three different animations, each made up of a number of individual movements—uses pun and metaphor to express a desire for the ocean to love us, as well as to reference our shared saline composition. An affectionate, poetic ode to the ocean at large, the work portrays a vast and diverse sea inclusive of graceful, filthy, tangled, and fantastic realities and imaginary churns. The work was created with custom software that allows for an infinite recombination of textures and characters within its repeating 24-minute cycle, ensuring the work never repeats.

Curated by Kendal Henry

Installation design: Blake Goble and Marina Zurkow

Software design: Sam Brenner

Technologist: Jim Schmitz

Fabrication: Scott Neal

Artwork courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marina Zurkow is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the near-impossible intersection of nature and culture. She uses life science, materials, and technologies—including food, software, animation, clay and other biomaterials—to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. 

She works as a founding member of several ongoing collaborative projects, including Dear Climate, More&More Unlimited, Climoji, and Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies. She has had recent solo exhibitions at bitforms gallery, New York and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. Her work has been featured at Storm King Art Center, New York; 21C Museum, Louisville, KY; the 7th Moscow Biennale; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose, CA; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others.