James Marilyn is a conceptual artist whose work transforms haunted domestic ritual into mythic installation. His debut project, The House That Haunts You, opens Halloween 2025 as a one-night-only experience in Woodstock, NY.

James Marilyn creates immersive rituals that transform memory, identity, and discarded cultural relics into mythic environments — blurring the sacred and the profane, the domestic and the communal. His practice sanctifies the discarded — materially, psychically, and culturally — offering emotionally charged experiences that unfold as participatory, symbolic rites.

James Marilyn did not emerge until the age of 40. Until then, he was — and still is — Josh Tierney, a creative strategist shaping narratives for global brands across luxury, hospitality, and culture, for clients ranging from Gucci to The White House. That world of image and aspiration is not a departure point but a pressure point — one Marilyn subverts from the inside out and the outside in.

The name “James Marilyn” is a metaphor for unrealized possibility: James is the middle name his mother once considered giving him but didn’t. Marilyn is the name she’d have given had he been born a girl. In reclaiming both, the artist creates not a persona but a mythic self, born of maternal dreaming, queer performance, and personal salvage.

This identity and practice converge through collecting and world-building. James Marilyn works with antiques and found objects — revered, forgotten, rediscovered, and discarded. These artifacts operate as emotional stand-ins and spiritual triggers: metaphors for time, transformation, and inheritance. 

Recontextualized, they become portals — inviting reflection on cultural decay, psychic residue, and the ghosts of inheritance.

At a moment defined by acceleration, collapse, and algorithmic spectacle, Marilyn’s work offers an antidote of slowness and reflection — intimate rituals against the noise of the contemporary.

The House That Haunts You is the first chapter in a growing cosmology — an evolving body of conceptual work that moves between installation, sculpture, performance, and lived ritual.