About - MARINAFINI

photographer 📷 filmmaker📹
🦋dream weaver 🦋
🐉fantasy maker🐉🧚🏻‍♂️plexiglass sculpter🧚🏻‍♂️

UCSC B.A Performance in New Media
(film production & costume design)

At the intersection of fashion, photography, film, stagecraft, and design, artist Marina Fini creates hallucinatory, alternative worlds. Based in California, she collaborates with friends and artists alike in the staging of these otherworldly scenes, using colorful costumes and her own handmade, plexiglass jewelry to turn her photographic subjects into ethereal cyber goddesses. When asked how she builds these characters, Fini remarked, “there’s something about transforming someone into someone they wouldn’t normally be … that is, creating an extension of themselves that I see in them.” All of her characters exude a captivating power, like the whimsical and intangible figures seen through a psychedelic dream. By exploring alternative selves in familiar contexts – a convenience store, or the Californian seaside, for example – Fini explores how subjecthood is fluid, and how such creative “shape-shifting” can alter the way we perceive our immediate reality.
- written by Hayley Evans for Beautiful Decay

PRESS

VICE- Motelscape
Schon! Magazine -video feature
Galore- photo editorial
Dazed- photos of Signe Pierce in Motelscape
Illusion Scene360- Motelscape
Getty- Motelscape
The Stranger- Motelscape 2
Dazed- Baddie Winkle
Paper- Lyrics to Life Installation
Dropbox- Lyrics to Life Installation
Chicago Tribune- WNDR MUSEUM
Billboard- photo of Olivia O'brien
GLAMOUR- photo of Isa Mazzei
Daily Beast-photo of Isa Mazzei
Hunger-photo of Isa Mazzei
Subvrt- MRK editorial (TEARS EP)
SubVrt- photo editorial of the Slather Sisters
MY 903
Hokkfabrica
Miami New Times- Goddessphere
Design Taxi- Ronalds
VICE- The Ronalds
LA weekly- photos of Isabel Hendrix
Marie Claire Brasil- photo of Baddie Winkle
Grunge and Art -Indyanna Editorial
Missy Magazine- Indyanna Editorial
Nylon
Nylon Japan- editorial of Sarah from KKB
Qetic- editorial shots of KKB
Trend Hunter - rainbow quartz jewelry
Trend Hunter- hand cursor jewelry
Charisma Talk (Japan)

INTERVIEWS

Biography

Marina Fini is a multimedia artist known for her plexiglass creations and ethereal full room installations that illuminate the complex and transformative relationships between digital technology, nature, psychedelia, and identity. Fini was born and raised in Los Angeles. She began her artistic career studying film at the University of California, Santa Cruz, majoring in Performance in New Media, a unique curriculum she designed that focused on the use of stagecraft, costuming, photography, and new technology in the production of experimental film narratives. Turning away from mainstream commercial media, Fini was already expressing her passion for cultivating a deeper, more conscious art practice that uncovers and empowers alternative and marginalized voices. Queer identities, abstract art, and high fantasy became themes that still resonate in her work today.

In 2012, Fini began incorporating crystals and plexiglass into her films, and shortly thereafter, began creating jewelry to fund her filmmaking projects. Her plexiglass jewelry, which she names “galactic warrior princess jewelry,” has gained her international attention for its colorful, cross-generational fusion of iconography from the ‘60s, ‘90s, and the digital age. In 2013, while living in the Californian wilderness, she created “Tree Temple,” a short film poking fun at internet-obsessed culture and exposing its darkness by contrasting cyber identities within natural landscapes. Shortly thereafter, she returned to LA, where she began incorporating her jewelry into small-scale installations.

In 2015, Fini decided she wanted to work on larger, more immersive projects. She began creating plexiglass furniture, and in collaboration with artists Signe Pierce & Sierra Grace, launched Motelscape at Art Basel in Miami Beach. Motelscape was a full-room installation involving video, photos and Fini’s unique décor in the creation of a secluded, fantasy-driven landscape; by combining the nostalgia of 1960s psychedelia with space-age motifs, Fini at once created a sensual alternate world while critiquing modern patterns of excess and the commodification of desire. Motelscape was met with acclaim, earning her accolades from publications such as VICE and Dazed. It was later recreated as Motelscape 2: Clean Rooms, Low Rates in Seattle in November 2017.

Creating escapist worlds became an ongoing theme for Fini, and in 2016, after experiencing a personal shift, she realized she wanted to go deeper. Her escapist art became more focused on spreading light, happiness, and color; she wanted people to escape into contentment by offering them a healing, utopic refuge in our often-darkworld. She began incorporating reiki and color therapy into her installations, creating energetic fields and connections to divine powers. As a manifestation of this creative dream, in 2017, Fini launched her biggest installation to date: Secret Paths to Marina Fini. Encompassing a warehouse in San Francisco for two weeks, Secret Paths combined nature and cyber culture, showing how, despite our increasingly digitized lives, people will always return to nature in order to seek clarity and connection. These themes shape Fini’s work today. Forever an integrative artist, Fini believes that such multi sensory experiences can soothe trauma and activate the potential of the true self, thereby bringing more peace into the collective consciousness.

In 2018, Marina moved to Joshua Tree and birthed Rainbow Bath House, a 2.5 year long take over of a 2 acre mid century home over looking the desert landscape. It changed everything for her in the sense that it functioned in the highest form thus far of her vision with installations. From hosting dance parties to workshops and utilizing it for shoots, it felt like the first installment for long lasting community involvement. The concept of Rainbow Bath house is to essentially bathe in rainbows 24/7, with interactive lighting with rainbow film refracting across the space during the day to projections, neon lights and color changing lighting throughout the home. There is a sense of joy and subconscious healing that organically erupts from saturated environments that she builds. The vision is to have community activation space for others to find safety, peace and healing.

Marina now focuses only on long term installations for her visions. Journeying deeper into her own self healing has led to a deeper understanding of what the world needs most, healing in all aspects. A permanent color therapy temple is in the works for the future. the most important thing to her is to help people heal in sacred safe space.