Mariah Robertson

Mariah Robertson is a rule-breaker. For her experimental, mid-sized to monumental photographs, she manipulates chemicals and materials to create handmade color and black-and-white prints, in which she pushes photography past documentation into abstraction. In her words, “I like to take a system and then sort of bend the rules, and change them, and shake the system to see what the breaking points are and what the functional points are.” She came to photography through her early performance pieces, initially using it as a tool to document these “social experiments.” This eventually escalated to her rebellious embrace of the medium, and her production of lush, painterly prints, infused with wit and full of colorful stains, striations, geometric forms, and ghostly, fragmented images. Among them are pictures of nude men, through which Robertson turns the male artist/female model dynamic on its head.