A look at her life and art with New Canaan art collector Mike Savage
Born in 1975 in Indianapolis and raised in Sacramento, California, Mariah Robertson moved to New York City, where she currently lives and works.
She studied Religious Studies (BA) at UC Berkeley before earning an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Early in her career, Robertson worked in San Francisco as a curator at the Lair of the Minotaur gallery, building her roots in experimental art communities.
I was first introduced to her amazing art a couple decades ago. Today, I proudly own several of her photo canvases.I’ve always been enamored with her journey and her perspective, so let me share a little intel on her life and her art.
Early Influences & Philosophy
Robertson’s journey began with a fascination for analogue photography and darkroom rituals, before evolving into a radical embrace of chance. As she recalls, when those initial “happy accidents” of chemical reactions occurred, her response was: “This is totally insane.”
Influences span action painting (think Pollock, Frankenthaler), solarization as pioneered by Man Ray, and the organic interventions of conceptual art — all refracted through her fascination with the unpredictable alchemy of chemical processes.
Style & Technique
Robertson’s work is most often camera-less, focusing on photograms: ultra-large sheets of light-sensitive RA-4 paper are exposed directly to light, then inundated with developer, bleach, chemicals—even ketchup bottles and syringes—to create dramatic flows of color, texture, and organic form.
She often works at scale—hundreds of feet of paper draped across walls or hung in folded installations—where jagged edges, undulating surfaces, and sculptural forms reinforce the work’s visceral impact.
As Robertson puts it: “A lot of photography is holding on to things. The opposite: let go of control.”
Influences & Artistic Lineage
Her aesthetic echoes action painters like Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, while her photogram methods nod to Man Ray’s avant-garde experiments. But Robertson pushes these traditions further by replacing pigment with light-sensitive paper and developer, resulting in what critics describe as “photographic painting.”
Her work remains conceptually anchored in photographic history, yet utterly liberated in execution.
Career & Exhibition Highlights
Solo Shows
- Everything Counts & Local Reality – Van Doren Waxter, New York (2023)
- Repetition & Difference – M+B, Los Angeles (2021); Van Doren Waxter, New York (2020)
- The Hydra – M+B, Los Angeles (2018)
- Photography Lovers’ Peninsula – M+B, LA (2015)
- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2011)
Group & Institutional Shows
Robertson’s works have been featured in major institutions including MoMA (NY), MoMA PS1, ICP New York, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, North Carolina Museum of Art, and National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Collections
Her work is held by some of the world’s most prestigious museums: MoMA, LACMA, Whitney, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and many others.
Why Her Work Matters
- Redefining Photography: Robertson dismantles traditional photographic practice by treating paper as canvas, chemicals as paint, and process as subject—challenging the boundaries of the medium.
- Embracing Uncertainty: Her works are charged with performative chance—each chemical interaction unpredictable, yet orchestrated in context and scale—creating surprising yet cohesive visual ecstasies.
- Material & Feminist Inquiry: By dismantling the lens and expectations of precision, Robertson reclaims the darkroom as a feminist space of inquiry and subversion, injecting humor, critique, and radical presence into the discourse.
- Conceptual Rigor Meets Sensory Impact: Her art blurs conceptual seriousness and sensory beauty. Works engage with time, materiality, energy, and perception in a way that’s both intellectually potent and viscerally immersive.
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Mariah Robertson’s practice remains one of the most inventive and unpredictable in contemporary art.
Through chemically driven alchemy, she dissolves photography’s conventions—camera, lens, control—and replaces them with a sensory and conceptual experience that is raw, expansive, and deeply resonant.
Her work isn’t just seen—it’s felt, sensed, and lived.
ABOUT MIKE SAVAGE
Savage of New Canaan, CT is the Founder of 1-800Accountant that helps businesses with their accounting services and needs through cutting-edge technology and customer support. He runs the company alongside CEO Brendon Pack.
In his spare time, Savage enjoys collecting Michael Jordan sneakers, vintage Lego sets, and admiring unique pop art.