Mariah Robertson

Robertson uses her whole body to unfurl, cut, mask, and spray, and in each series these works incorporate her foundational background in performance art–which Robertson attributes as much to a seminal undergraduate class she took on Temporal Structures/New Genres class (focusing on the work of Adrien Piper and Vito Acconci) as she does the weekly drag shows she attended at San Francisco’s the Stud, hosted by the late Heklina. This period led Robertson to photography, which began out of a need to document her temporally fleeting performance work. On a conceptual level, Robertson performs as a photographer–making photographic prints in a darkroom with the lights on. Her works are corporeally embodied, they ask the viewer to interrogate their own making. Each works’ three dimensional form possesses an objecthood, activates space, and are subject to subtle changes over long periods of time, creating works that are thoroughly engaged with temporality.