MARIAH ROBERTSON
I am Passions
October 15 through November 14, 2009

October 28, 2009

CRITICS' PICK

MARIAH ROBERTSON

While most young photographers plunge into theory, politics, or portraiture to develop their themes, Mariah Robertson canít get out of the darkroom. Her aim is to explore the process of making pictures, rather than making meaning, and she uses all the technological tools at her disposalócolor separation, oversaturated hues, photograms, chemical drips, and so onóto disrupt the formís conventions.

Cut haphazardly from large rolls of photographic paper and allowed to curl and buckle within their frames (making them sculptures as much as photographs), the seventeen images in this show mix the aesthetics of early computer graphics, futurist dynamism, and LA noir. One image depicts a planet ringed in gold emerging from behind the vanishing point of an array of grids. (Think Tron.) In the foreground, colored blocks tumble off the edge of the grid, like water from a cliff. (Unsurprisingly, Robertsonís workóblurred sequences of lights that resemble something out of Close Encountersóhas been included in Discover magazine.) Another includes the blanched spines and covers of books such as Develop Your Psychic Skills, Frantz Fanonís Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and Vibrations and Wavesóall hints, perhaps, at Robertsonís interest in thinking beyond the mediumís norms and producing a fresh logic. In fact, she resembles a kind of Richard Tuttle of photography, utilizing all the mundane tools of film developingóthe chemicals and processesóto erase the line between representation and abstraction and to make, in Tuttleís words, ìsomething that looks like itself.î

Nicole Rudick