Current Solo Exhibition

Many Mini Moons

Opening Oct 19, 2024 at Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY

A Photogram and a Still Life Painting of that Photogram, looking at each other.

Since 2015, I have been working on a commissioned project for a large non-commercial entity building at a facility in a foreign country far from the US. Over the years there have been technical requirement changes and other challenges to the point that it would be impossible to make the work as originally proposed. At some point last year, I re-proposed making painted copies of my photograms.  This came about in part because I saw a painter I admire use lens based source imagery in a way I found lazy, and a critical amount of friends had said to me that my work was “painting.” I’m able to talk endlessly about how my work is a conceptual analysis of photography as a system and grows out of my performance practice, but my understanding of painting is a bit stunted, being frozen where I was at age 13 spray painting all my belongings black. 

And so, I thought I would “learn by doing” and hitch my immediate prospects to this project so I could not turn back.

It’s been a really strange, destabilizing inner and outer journey. I have been keeping a choppy journal of a person who has achieved some skill in one field, trying to learn another, failing and making scary bad decisions, all while contemplating what it means to copy, to interpret, to reproduce. I’ve worked on various aspects of materiality of photography, inverting the gendered gaze, and now the double helix relationship with drawing/painting. It’s actually terrifying me as we speak and I think it would best be expressed with writing, but there’s also all the detritus of making along the way.

Currently, I’m trying to “copy” 2 photograms, or interpret them via memory or translation or reproduce them in a new medium. 

-Mariah Robertson

September, 2024