reviews MARIAH ROBERTSON
MAriAh
robertson:
nudes, still
lives, And
lAndscApes
GuIld & GREySHkul, NEw yORk
3 NOvEM BER – 8 dECEM BER
Mariah Robertson’s second exhibition with New
York’s Guild & Greyshkul follows its title into well-trod
territory, but with a few significant twists. The 30-odd
black-and-white photographs ringing the front room
of the gallery present their subject matter through
a thick layer of interference, produced by in-camera
and studio tricks like masking and photocollage.
Robertson’s technical retrospection and analogue
proclivities suggest the ways visuality may be wanting
in our digital era and, on a broader level, place her in
line behind practitioners like Man Ray, who expanded
the scope of the medium by playing to its margins.
Legend cites Ray as the first to explore
the artistic possibilities of solarisation – a usually
accidental effect, generated by the exposure of
film to light during its development. Robertson also
deploys this technique, suspending her subjects in
a luminous purgatory and cutting their contours as
if from marble. Instead of imbuing her photographs
with the magical potency of Ray’s portraits and nudes,
however, Robertson’s treatment, conjoined with the
Untitled Nude 3, 2007, silver gelatin print,
exhibition’s crowded hanging, has the effect of homogenising them. Aesthetic uniformity here
42 x 37 cm (framed), unique print,
edition of 4 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist
appears to be a strategic move, one that forces viewers onto a terrain so semiologically dissonant
and materially dense as to make genre-based interpretation seem beside the point. A solarised
collage of a male rump nestled between two rather allusive wicker baskets (Collage 9, all works
2007), for example, can be found hanging aside a no-less-suggestive still life of pitchers (Pitchers)
and an appropriated Queen album cover, upon which the artist has layered a hand-masked bullseye
encircling her naked-cyclist alter ego (Found Self Portrait, Modified).
Undoubtedly there’s a feminist agenda playing across these works and others in the show,
from the dozen images of men’s butts to the single black pedestal displaying vanitas-style tintypes
of a skull and instructional text on nude photography, opened to spreads of toned female flesh. The
tintypes keep watchful eye over Robertson’s army of rumps, and one cannot but read a conceptual,
even divine authority into the metal upon which they are printed, and the Perspex boxes that encase
them. If they do offer statements of intent on behalf of the exhibition, it’s that Robertson’s drive to
challenge the misogynistic overtones of nude photography is part-and-parcel of her willingness to
poke fun at gender-based historical revisionism, all the while engaging in it. In Collage 1, Robertson’s
oversize, silhouetted hand, replete with diamond engagement ring, comically balances a male nude,
while Untitled Self Portrait 1 finds her coy smile and ample rack drawn across another nude’s back
and buttocks. Such cheesy, frequently pervy humour may, in some cases, be just that; but in the
strongest examples from Robertson’s output, a dumb joke can expose the less salient aspects of
gender and eroticism simply by inviting us to just laugh it off. Tyler Coburn
Artreview 122
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 122 4/12/07 15:36:17
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