Rose Marasco: Pinholes and Parallax
OSMOS is pleased to present Pinholes and Parallax, Rose Marasco’s first solo exhibition in New York, marking the continuation of a collaboration that began in 2023.
The exhibition brings together two distinct yet closely related bodies of work. Parallax consists of photographs made between 2020 and 2022, during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In these works, Marasco draws from the forms cast by shadows to construct square-format compositions, often created by combining multiple images into a single visual field. Her immediate surroundings are transformed into abstract scenes, imbued with what the artist describes as a “complex visual feeling.” The title refers to the phenomenon of parallax—the apparent shift in an object’s position depending on the viewer’s point of observation—a concept that echoes the perceptual tension that runs throughout the work.
Alongside these photographs, the exhibition includes a selection of pinhole images made in New York City between 2011 and 2014. Here again, the image is not conceived as a straightforward depiction of reality, but as a space of slippage and ambiguity. As John Yau writes, although Marasco may point the camera at something recognizable, she is never literal or theatrical; her attention is drawn to something that eludes immediate vision. Lucy Lippard identifies this quality as central to Marasco’s practice, noting that in her hands the familiar becomes unfamiliar and everyday life is transformed into a new visual language—a true “vernacular.”
About the Author
Rose Marasco (b. 1948, Utica, New York) lives and works in Portland, Maine. Her photographic practice focuses on shadows, silhouettes, forms from the natural world, and everyday objects, approached through a perceptual inquiry that challenges conventional modes of representation.
She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Southern Maine. Marasco has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Houston Center for Photography, the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College, the Farnsworth Museum of Art, and the University of New England Art Gallery. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, among them the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the New York Public Library Photography Collection, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress.
In 2023, OSMOS presented Marasco’s Projection Series at the inaugural Photo New York Fair at the Javits Center. In 2025, OSMOS presented her solo exhibition Pinholes and Parallax.
Rose Marasco: Pinholes and Parallax
through January 24
OSMOS Gallery – New York – USA
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