Pinholes and Parallax

Osmos is pleased to present our first solo exhibition in New York City with Rose Marasco (b. 1948 in Utica, NY), an artist we have been working with since 2023. The photographs in Parallax, made during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020-2022, draw inspiration from the shapes of shadows. Their square format, as well as Marasco's arrangement of multiple images into single compositions, transform Marasco's neighborhood into abstract scenes, suffused with, in Marasco's own words, "complex visual feeling"—a transformation ultimately in line with the meaning of parallax, which refers to "the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera." Marasco's NYC Pinhole photographs made from 2011 to 2014 are likewise uninterested in representation as an end in and of itself. As John Yau writes, "Marasco might point the camera at something, but she is not being literal or theatrical. Something else has caught her attention..." Lucy Lippard notes something similar in the introduction to Rose Marasco: At Home, the monograph published by Osmos Books in 2024: "In her hands the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Everyday life becomes life itself." In this way, Lippard says, Marasco "has created a new vernacular." Marasco is currently a distinguished professor emerita at the University of Southern Maine. She has had solo shows at 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, among others. Her works are in numerous public and private collections, including The Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the New York Public Library Photography Collection, the Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. In 2023, Osmos presented her Projection Series at the inaugural Photo New York Fair at the Javits Center in New York.