Mariah Robertson was born in 1975 in Indianapolis, Indiana, grew up in Sacramento, California, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Mariah Robertson is a rule-breaker. For her experimental, mid-sized to monumental photographs, she manipulates chemicals and materials to create handmade color and black-and-white prints, in which she pushes photography past documentation into abstraction. She experiments in the darkroom, creating multiple-exposure photos, masking and dodging light, and changing color filters.

In her words, “I like to take a system and then sort of bend the rules, and change them, and shake the system to see what the breaking points are and what the functional points are.” She came to photography through her early performance pieces, initially using it as a tool to document these “social experiments.” This eventually escalated to her rebellious embrace of the medium, and her production of lush, painterly prints, infused with wit and full of colorful stains, striations, geometric forms, and ghostly, fragmented images.

How does an artist come to grips with the uncontrollable? Filmed over the course of four years, artist Mariah Roberston experiments with photographic chemistry in her Brooklyn darkroom, leading to a striking series of colorful cameraless abstractions.

Recent solo shows include

M+B, Los Angeles, CA
American Contemporary, NY
Works appear in
the Sir Elton John Photography collection
North Carolina Museum of Art
JP Morgan Chase Art Collection
and the permanent collections of MoMA, NY, and LACMA, CA.