New York based photographer Marianna Rothen is back with a new book release. The pictures are the sequel of the first edition, and play with the question of how the story continues after happiness and getting everything you wanted. The US release of the book will also coincide with the solo show at Steven Kasher Gallery which opens February 23rd. Recommended!
The photographs in Shadows in Paradise – published by b.frank books – reference three films: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Robert Altman’s Three Women and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. In Rothen’s female-helmed dream world her characters find themselves and lose themselves. These images portray characters that debuted in Rothen’s 2014 book Snow and Rose & Other Tales. When we last saw Rothen’s women they were dancing exuberantly in the nude, celebrating their male-free utopia. Now we see them struggling to stay connected to their idealized notions of self, coping with their shattered illusions, falling deeper into derangement. This new series explores life after happiness, after you get everything you want but nothing is as planned. It asks what it means to be a woman among women in a world where men are banished yet lurking.
Rothen creates her work with a complex alternation of analog and digital processes. Her subjects are captured digitally, then re-photographed onto Polaroid film which is digitally scanned and digitally printed for exhibition. Thus Rothen creates a unique retrograde cinematic tonality in her pictures.
Marianna Rothen: Shadows in Paradise
Exhibition: February 23 – April 15, 2017
Steven Kasher Gallery – 515 W. 26th St., New York, NY 10001.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 23rd, 6-8PM
