In Mariah Robertson’s exhibition Nudes, Still Lives, and Landscapes, the conceptual artist revisits early photographic techniques to question the transparency of viewing the present. Techniques like ambrotype, solarization, and photocollage threaten to disappear in the wake of digital photography. In using what Robertson calls “alternative historical practices,” her uncanny black and white photographs read as contemporary critiques on the subjective nature of looking. If classical still life photography dictates that the technique be crystal-clear and the objects presented be mute subjects, Robertson deftly, and with a sly sense of humor, appropriates the standard tropes of still life photography to critique what we view as normal, innocuous, and natural. In decisively reaching for conceptual tactics of appropriation and reframing, the deadpan, seemingly “normal” photographs of nudes, still lives, and landscapes become charged fields of looking, full of interference from an unstable past.

By using manual in-camera and darkroom techniques, the physical manipulations Robertson uses are foregrounded in the reading of her work, calling attention to the fractured manner of viewing the present. In “Found Self Portrait, Modified”, Robertson re-photographs a 1978 Queen album cover of a frieze of nude women on bicycles, using solarization and negative-collage to superimpose a target onto the busy image. Within the bulls eye is a woman whom Robertson identifies as her physical alter ego, or doppelganger, yet only in hindsight. Born in 1975, Robertson would only have been 3-years old at the time of the album’s release. The artist’s ambivalent claim of self-representation through the pop-culture image becomes a humorous appropriation of the past, and of projecting the self against the anonymous crowd of barenaked ladies.

In “Nude with Afghani Export Rug”, Robertson uses solarization again to politicize the classic still life mise en scene: the nude body within the domestic interior. A nude man is presented cropped below the waist and viewed from behind, standing partly on a woven carpet made for export and dragged back by its owner from overseas. Woven into the ornate carpet are objects of war: AK-47s, helicopters, and tanks, all mutely presenting an unseen battle “over there” at odds within the American, domestic setting safely enclosing it. Through solarization, the images on the carpet jump out in strong contrasts, with the nude male becoming one among many objects for the viewer to consider, or just another body.

In “Still Life 3”, Robertson considers the complexity of representing the present moment. Here Robertson uses ambrotype (wet plate glass negative), a technique from the1850s, framing the objects within as artifacts charged by the past. Against a dime-store floral print backdrop sits an opened 1970s book on How to Photograph Female Nudes book, its dated images of oiled female bodies at odds with the skull placed against the book’s spine. In this merging of contradictory cultural moments, the viewing of the image becomes a fraught negotiation with the complex past, instead of a safe, nostalgic seduction.