PORTLAND, ORE.- Adams and Ollman presents Marina Grize: In-Between Touch, a solo exhibition featuring photographs from the artist's ongoing series of women in and around water. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, June 20, from 5–7pm and is on view through August 2, 2025.


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If the movie or television screen is a lens and a mirror, a point of connection and a reminder of distance, Grize's work becomes a site of reclamation as she archives and records stills of women in water from lesbian cinema. Her photographs, dye diffusion transfer prints made with expired film, are diffuse, veiled, liminal, and richly colored. Grize's figures are often closely cropped or turned away from the camera; out of focus, obscured, or introspective, rather than available for the voyeuristic gaze. By releasing her subjects from the specificity of their narrative contexts, Grize retrieves these moments as personal traces of longing and desire.


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Water has long been associated with life and birth, liberation and oblivion. As a space of possibility and imagination, play and threat, longing and actualization, it has also long served as a metaphor for queerness. Grize explores this recurring motif in queer women's narratives across film and literature. From the 1930s through the 1960s, queer representation in cinema was heavily censored under the Hays Code, prompting filmmakers to rely on coded depictions. Grize channels this lineage, drawing particular inspiration from Clara Bradbury-Rance's Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory, whose notion of “in-between touch” underpins the exhibition's title. In this framework, desire is most powerfully represented not through explicit acts but through ambiguous, sensory, and affective moments that inhabit the spaces "in-between" bodies, gestures, and identities. Water becomes one such site where desire can be felt, sensed, and negotiated, but not necessarily named or resolved.

As Grize selects and photographs these female figures, she brings complexity and presence to representations of queerness. The works offer an alternative to photography as an act of violence or surveillance, instead sharing images in service of intimacy and care.

Marina Grize (b. 1987, Sharon, CT; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) received a BFA from SUNY Purchase, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Sweetwater, Berlin, Germany; the Athenaeum, San Diego, CA; and ICA San Diego, CA; among others.