LAGUNA BEACH, CALIF.- Laguna Art Museum announces Marnie Weber: The Doll House, a special presentation of the artist’s monumental sculptural work The Doll House (2002) alongside a suite of related photographs. The exhibition marks the first time the piece has been shown in Southern California in more than a decade, following its last appearance in Weber’s 2005 survey exhibition at The Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles.

“We’re proud to present The Doll House and welcome this important work into our collection,” said Julie Perlin Lee, Executive Director of Laguna Art Museum. “Marnie Weber’s imaginative and surreal vision offers a powerful example of the kind of bold California art Laguna Art Museum is committed to sharing.”

Weber has described The Doll House, which features eleven intricately designed rooms, as a “storybook house” that explores the subconscious world of dreams and imagination. When viewed from the front, the structure resembles a face, its windows and doorway forming a melancholic expression, as if the house is emotionally invested in the inner worlds it protects.

Each room offers a theatrical and emotionally charged setting. A snow-filled room features a frozen indoor pond, an autumnal space is strewn with fallen leaves and a “dust room” is cloaked in white sheets. In the attic, a sailboat appears to have drifted in with the tide, while the grand staircase is overtaken by rising water. Other rooms include a trophy room adorned with animal heads and environments decorated with richly detailed objects and textures.

Weber photographed each room and transformed the images into large-scale c-prints. She then collaged ghostly female figures into the photographs, apparitions composed of found imagery including mannequin faces, fashion magazine bodies and vintage party dresses. While these characters do not appear in the physical sculpture, they animate the photographs with suggested narratives, frozen in moments of mystery, vulnerability and quiet intensity.

Together, the sculpture and photographs exemplify Weber’s unique approach to artmaking, which merges surrealism, fairytale logic and performative installation. Her work often centers female figures in roles of power, transformation and emotional depth, placing them in richly imagined worlds that oscillate between fantasy and reality.

Marnie Weber (b. 1959 in Bridgeport, CT) has developed a multidisciplinary practice that includes performance, music, sculpture, photography, film, video, costuming and collage, among other media. Over the course of her three-decade career, she has created fictional characters, including female protagonists, animals and mythological creatures who are given roles in her self-created narratives of transformation and discovery.

In addition to her museum and gallery exhibitions, in 2004 Weber created the band and performance group “The Spirit Girls”. With the group, she performed and released albums, as well as created cover art for the recordings and other performance related ephemera. Weber’s work is inspired by fiction as well as history, including the mid-nineteenth-century American Spiritualist movement, which found connections between the living and the spiritual world of the afterlife, with women often acting as mediums. Throughout her work, she strikes a decidedly feminist position in exploring history through social fiction.

Weber attended University of Southern California and graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (BA, 1981). She currently divides her time between Los Angeles and Milford, Connecticut. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; FRAC Paris, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain Geneva (MAMCO), Switzerland, among other institutions.