Image credit: courtesy of the artist
Residency period: July - September, 2025
Mara Eagle is a multimedia artist based in Montréal. Born in Boston in 1988, she holds a Bachelor of Arts from Marlboro College (Vermont) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montréal). While her background is in traditional media, today her practice grounds in a combination of video, sculpture, and digital mural-making. She is heavily influenced by European art history, the philosophy of science and her longstanding fascination with nature, music, technology and storytelling.
In 2025, she was artist in residence at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), and presented work at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Art Toronto, and with the City of Montreal in the public group exhibition “Regarde!”. In 2024, she presented her first large-format digital mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. In 2023 she was nominated for the Pierre-Ayot prize, and had her solo show, PRETTY TALK, featured in the MOMENTA Biennale as Concordia’s 2020 Bronfman Fellow. She is represented by Pangée Gallery, and has recently exhibited at the Fondation Phi, as well as artist run centres across Canada. Her practice has been generously supported by the Canada Council, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Berggruen Institute, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation.
Image courtesy of the artist
Project Description
Spawn is a series of six digital images by artist Mara Eagle. A meditation on creative authorship in the age of algorithmic reproduction, Spawn proliferates the storied, dyadic figures of Adam and Eve into multiple embodied forms in communion with one another. These dancing, tree-like bodies have the texture of mud and the aura of bronzed deities. They are neither organic nor holy, and yet they evoke both categories. Hovering above the viewer, the figures in Spawn are meant to be gazed up at, as if in idolatry. Their digitally-simulated depth and volume is untouchable, evidencing both the ‘divine power’ we attribute to AI and the emergence of new definitions of the Real.
Spawn is the product of a co-authored process of creation that re-imagines ‘the body’ as an unfixed collective that is hybrid and vast. Taking Albrecht Durer's iconic representation of Adam and Eve (housed within the AGO’s collection) as a source image, the artist used an AI-driven platform to generate 3D models from the engraving, from which she painstakingly re-rendered and regenerated copy after copy. Undergoing hundreds of re-generations, the ‘mother and father of humanity’ appear progressively abstract as the algorithm’s glitches accumulate. As the original couple fractures and proliferates, they shapeshift across multiple human and vegetal forms, becoming indecipherable within the binary categories of male/female, and human/non-human.
- Text by Hilary Bergen
