For FIAC's (OFF)ICIELLE 2015, M+B presents an installation of photographic works by Mariah Robertson created through two distinct darkroom processes. These seemingly disparate approaches are in fact part of the same project for Robertson, in which chance combinations and intended marks can be simultaneously captured in differing degrees all in one piece.
To create her gestural, all-over abstractions, Robertson employs the elemental components of the medium: light, photo chemicals and a light-sensitive surface. Cutting her works off the roll of photographic paper and leaving them with irregular edges, each piece is hand-processed, the result of applying chemicals in varying dilutions and temperatures directly to the paper. Presented alongside these works are the artist's new color photograms. Similarly made without a camera, the repeated geometric forms bear the evidence of their own production, where the physical process of making the work becomes integral to the image itself.
Mariah Robertson (b. 1975, Indianapolis, IN) received her BA from University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited widely including recent solo institutional shows at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, UK, and Grand Arts, Kansas City, along with a two-person show at Cleveland Museum of Art's Transformer Station. Recent group exhibitions include What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography, New York; A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Part Picture, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Greater New York at MoMA/PS1, New York, and Modern Alchemy: Experiments in Photography at the Heckscher Museum of Art, New York. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Mariah Robertson lives and works in Brooklyn.
