Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: Three Dimensions
Installation view, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: Balancing Act, 2023. Contemporary Calgary.
July 27 - December 5, 2026
Organized and circulated by Contemporary Calgary, AB 
Three Dimensions is fun and perplexing! There’s a giant claw crane game and an interactive video installation that responds to viewer engagement. But this exhibition is much more than an artistic arcade: its installations explore notions of reality, authorship, perception, and the effects of technology on human behaviour.
This exhibition presents constructed environments and deconstructed narratives through the practice of multidisciplinary artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, brought together in two immersive installations: Balancing Act and THX2020. Combining painting, sculpture, kinetics, and video, these environments render elements as hyperreal, blurring the boundary between the real and the simulated, where the latter can often appear more compelling.
Balancing Act consists of a user-controlled large-scale claw crane machine modelled on industrial excavation equipment, alongside paintings depicting modular, quasi-anthropomorphic architectural forms. The stacked configurations in the paintings mirror the stacking of soft felted blocks within the sculptural field, translating processes of construction, extraction, and resource distribution into an interactive structure of play. The soft forms appear in both painting and installation, shifting meaning as they move between image, object, and interaction. What emerges is an unstable structure of control, chance, and authorship, shaped as much by expectation as by outcome.
THX2020 is an interconnected installation that combines painting, narrative video, and an interactive headset that responds to viewer engagement by remixing shapes on the video screen. Blending fine art, popular culture, and mass media, THX2020 comments on the relationship and tensions between scientific research, psychological control, and pharmacological outcomes and examines the ways in which imagery and ideas are manipulated in digital space.
Taken together, these two works emphasize viewer participation and explore themes of agency in the digital age through performativity and interactivity. Like many of their previous works, Balancing Act and THX2020 reference high and pop culture, combining science fiction, politics, art history and meta-realities. With their signature emphasis on engagement, the artists prompt reflection on visual language, mass media, consumerism, and the ways in which images circulate.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, Staring, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36". Image from Contemporary Calgary.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have practiced sculpture, installation and media art since 2000. Jennifer Marman is a graduate of Western University. Daniel Borins is a graduate of McGill University. Both Marman and Borins are graduates of the Ontario College of Art and Design. Their work is exhibited and collected widely including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. They are represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York; MKG127, Toronto; and Royale Projects, Los Angeles.
This exhibition is supported by the Schulich Foundation.
