Mariah Robertson

Mariah Robertson unveils a new group of photograms in "Repitition and Difference" at Van Doren Waxter that reveals her experimentation with the medium. Known for her method of creating photoworks without a camera, Robertson refigures the conditions of darkroom photography to develop alternate representational outcomes. Her practice aims not at rendering scenes from life but at distorting the medium of image-making itself.

Working in intervals of two-second exposures, Robertson adjusts the color balance of filters and the location of hand-cut exposure masks. This brief moment of intervention imbues her photographs with shifting movements and tonalities that are part chance, part plan. The moment they capture compresses time and action into a frame of two-seconds, expanding the possibilities of photography beyond the purely observational.

Robertson reintegrates these prints as she brings them together within a frame: an activation which extends their creation through repetition and differentiation. Her latest exploration of representation and reproduction in photographic terms results in vibrant prisms of overlapping color resembling panes of stained glass.