The little Black Gallery is curating work by Canadian photographer and fashion model Marianna Rothen, her first solo exhibition in London, starting from 23 January – 24 February 2018.

According to a press release, the characters of Shadows in Paradise are portrayed by Rothen herself and by her models/muses/friends in photographs that were shot in Rothen’s home in upstate New York.

The photos were taken both in 2015 when the house was in a decrepit, nearly abandoned state, and then in the summer of 2016 after obsessive renovations.

Carlo McCormick writes in the book introduction: “We know this place; it is the landscape of what has been lost and the broken ground upon which the forgotten grows…. It is not a destination but a sidetrack of indetermination, it is a borderline.”

The photographs in Shadows in Paradise 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.

The work 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. This creates a unique retrograde cinematic tonality in her pictures.

Rothen was born in Canada in 1982. After becoming a fashion model at age 15, Marianna spent several years traveling, working and documenting her experiences through photographs. Since 2007 her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Paris, Sydney, Cologne and Istanbul. Her first monograph ‘Snow and Rose & Other Tales’ was published by b.frank books in 2014.

The Little Black Gallery
13A PArk Walk, Chelsea, London
SW10 0AJ