Maralie
Maralie Armstrong-Rial is a NYC based artist, vocalist, and educator whose work finds heritage in a genealogy of spiritual and sensual expression via technology. Intermingling audio, video, sculpture, and performance she seduces poetics from human-machine interaction.

Born into a Uruguayan American polyglot family, she found herself in the hyphen between concrete definitions, cultures, and ultimately genres. A reflection of this fluent upbringing is the difficultly to classify Armstrong-Rial’s varied yet distinct oeuvre. While studying sculpture at KCAI, she developed an attention for deep listening under composer Rev Dwight Frizzell’s guidance. At this time Maralie was also feverishly touring internationally in the DIY punk network. Hundreds of site specific and durational performances later she began performing collaboratively as Humanbeast with artist and partner Eli V Manuscript and solo as VALISE. VALISE is a live multimedia performance project which speaks and dances with itself, transposes ancient star data into midi maps, and produces recordings strictly within the limits of mixing between multiple browser tabs (which the artist refers to as “browser” genre music). Recordings as VALISE have been published by Primitive Languages, No Rent Records, Angoisse, and Devine. Both projects continue to actively perform in a variety of underground show spaces, forests, funerals, galleries, and museums.

As a vocalist Armstrong-Rial’s background in church singing instilled the practice of marking life events with ceremony, song, and ritual. A reaching for the unseen or celestial otherness is often evoked. Meditations on the Eternal and the temporal form her living pattern of dance. As a choreographer/dancer her work has been included in Nick Cave’s KCAI Gala Soundsuit performance, Bonedust’s ‘Fruit of the Ash,’ and in Hana van der Kolk’s ‘The Third Thing.’ Enriching her practice as an exhibiting artist Maralie currently works as a visiting assistant professor at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design More >>


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