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Excerpts from: exhibition reviews, critical writing, and catalogue essays on my photographs

Sarah Morthand, director, Sarah Morthand Gallery, NYC
“ Soon after I founded my gallery in December of 1996, Rose and I met to review her work. I was deeply impressed by the caliber of her portfolio and her quiet intelligence…Rose’s work fully reveals her talents as a photographer and her appreciation of history, writing, and objects. Rarely have I seen the combination of techniques (color, black and white, montage, image construction) used so successfully and appropriately. “

Lucy-Flint Gohlke, curator Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College
“ By offering domestic objects up to public display in a profoundly felt way, Marasco convinces us that the stuff of everyday life, and our response to it, defines us as truly and significantly as heroic narratives that so often monopolize our understanding of culture…The work is brilliant both visual and conceptually….”

Vince Aletti, photography reviewer, The Village Voice
“ With these photos of brightly colored aprons, wooden clothespins, quilt squares, and button arrangements, Marasco evokes and celebrates women’s work without resorting to clumsy didacticism. Placing three old thimbles in a bird’s nest, a girl’s penmanship book among autumn leaves, or a wooden rolling pin on a rock by a lake, Marasco has a light, sure, and very charming touch.”

Margarett Loke, art reviewer, The New York Times
“… highlighting commonplace items in rural New England women’s lives, Ms. Marasco succeeds not only in investing them with the kind of aura surrounding Shaker household objects but, also in giving them a Surrealistic cast. Buttons sewn in the form of a cross on a piece of cardboard look decorously iconic. But, in the companion picture of the back of the cardboard, the thread and small safety pins holding the button in place seem to connote quiet suffering.”

Philip Issacson, art reviewer, The Maine Sunday Telegram
“ Marasco’s work is offered in deep saturated cibachrome and retains a jewel-like quality. Both form and color are explicit ingredients in a type of conceptual art handled by a master. …I point out that Marasco’s work in this show is enhanced if seen as a sequence---a syncopation---rather than a series of autonomous events.”

Alison Ferris, curator Bowdoin College Museum of Art
“ Marasco brings maps and detachable collars together in Collars and Atlas, which is not as unlikely a combination as it might at first seem. Like the lines that mark the borders of countries on maps, collars mark the boundries of the body. Marasco playfully makes formal juxtapositions with the collars and the maps, “feminizing” the markings of territories …”

“ Goings On About Town”, The New Yorker
“ The most affecting works recontextualize old photographs; one picture, of a woman named Florence Burrill Jacobs (whose diary the artist also found), is elegantly surrounded by a carpet of umber grape leaves, rhyming with the image of the young woman sitting in the doorway overgrown
with grapevines.”

Deborah Martin Kao, curator of photography, The Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University
“ …depending on the viewer’s frame of reference, her photographs might alternately be interpreted as representing a documentation of domestic handiwork, an array of scientifically organized specimens, a display of consumer goods, or abstract art. Marasco intentionally prompts multiple interpretations of how meaning is modulated by culturally prescribed and frequently gender-based methods of classification…Marasco’s work holds in an exquisite tension the subject matter, its representation, and its signification.

Christine Temin, art reviewer, The Boston Globe
“ She startles you with surreal juxtapositions, like the rolling pin balanced on a rock by the shore of a lake. In taking an indoor object outside she forces you to contemplate its possibilities. The rolling pin can smooth and strike, be used to make a pie or for violence. In another work, a washboard that has somehow escaped the laundry and moved into a woodland setting rests against a tree: The half-elegiac, half-comical image suggests flight from the confines of home into the freedom of nature. Marasco’s brilliantly colored photographs come off as secrets revealed.”

Julia Van Haaften, curator The New York Public Library Photography Collection
“ I have known and admired Rose’s work for more than ten years. Beginning with the Maine Grange documentation which expands intellectually upon a taxonomic formula for architectural photography established by Berenice Abbott, Rose has evolved and matured into an important photographic artist, working with universally accessible subject matter in concepts and compositions uniquely her own. Rose’s later work brings a whole new meaning to documentary—powerfully affecting yet never sentimental as it addresses the concerns, the environments, and ordinary daily lives of women in the last century. Original, insightful, and enduring, Rose’s constructed photographs use found artifacts…to evoke individual women and their lives. Most importantly, the photographs’ compelling visual beauty and formal rigor transcend pragmatic social references.”

Edgar Allen Beem, art reviewer Maine Times and contributor Photo District News
“ Wishbone Diary, for example, features an open diary around which are arranged what look to me to be broad magnolia leaves and cones and a wishbone. The handwritten January 14 diary entry reads, in part, ‘ Work. Read book in evening & went to bed. O Gee, I wish something would happen.’
There is something both precious and political about the way Marasco chooses to honor the anonymous women whose private lives she has entered through their writings.”
Aprile Gallant, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs Smith College Museum of Art
“ One of the exceptional things about Rose as an artist is her ability to create powerful bodies of work in both black and white and color, and to work on many different strong projects at one time. On my last studio visit with her, she showed me three different bodies of work in different formats, all of which were well crafted and conceptually compelling.”

Carl Little, art reviewer Maine Times
“ Her latest project, Leafing, continues her poetic explorations of the past using old diaries, atlases, and scrapbooks that she has found in her travels. In arranging her still lifes, the artist uses bobby pins, silverware, dice, and other items to accent the pages of the timeworn books. The result is a kind of resonant collage, where the focus is so sharp you have to look closely to see that it is, indeed, a photography you are studying.”