≡ The art of portraiture, by Marina Rosso ≡

I

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12.

II

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants, 2014.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants, 2014.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants, 2014.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants, 2014.

Marina’s Stetement:

“In 1965 Lake Chagan, often referenced as “Atomic Lake”, was created during a nuclear test in the modern state of Kazakhstan. Craft, energy, explosive anger are the tools used to deconstruct nature and therefore, its representation in our society.

Born from waste paper through the printing process of my latest book “The Beautiful Gene” composed of clean and duly classified portraits, these images are the direct consequence of the uncontrolled energy that we are handling with. This canny result offers in a silent and fortuitous outcome a new deformed and deconstructed interpretation of our modern thinking.”

III

© Marina Rosso, from the book The Beautiful Gene, 2014.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series The Beautiful Gene, 2014.

© Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series The Beautiful Gene, 2014.

Marina’s Stetement:

“In September 2011 the world’s biggest sperm bank, stopped accepting red haired donors for a period: demand for them was too low compared to the supply.

Single women, who currently represent half of the customer base, tend to select donors based on the search for a “dream prince”. Increasingly, new lives are engineered in an attempt to reach a sort of personal ideal, what philosophers call individual or new eugenics. And personal ideals rarely feature red hair. After being scorned, persecuted and marginalized for centuries, could redheads now begin to be eliminated in a conspiracy of online questionnaires, aseptic clinics and frozen sperm?

As a provocation to this system, I decided to act as a conservation geneticist who would classify the genetic variation of a species in the first step to preserve its diversity and components. I started by creating a matrix that would represent the red hair gene through 48 categories, each uniquely combining this feature with five more physical traits (gender, height, build, eye color and hair type). Then I set out on a journey looking for real people who could literally embody these categories.”