PARIS.- To open its 2026 fall season, Galerie Miranda presents a two-person exhibition by contemporary artists Justine Kurland (1969, American) and Mariah Robertson (1975, American), both known for challenging the photographic status quo. In the exhibition Antiphoto, Justine Kurland and Mariah Robertson do not just challenge the photographic canon, they lay it to siege, by cutting up, painting over, photocopying and repurposing its founding pillars.
Justine Kurland contributes two distinct bodies of work to the exhibition. 99 Nudes on the Wall (2026) is a collage in ninety-nine parts. Installed as a sprawling mural, it evolves in real time as transactions are made: Individual works are removed upon purchase, generating dynamic compositions that reflect the demands of the market. Three paintings from Kurland’s recent series Bad Hand (2025) are also on view. In these works, the artist copies her late father’s still lifes in oil paint applied over collaged canvases made from the same source material, Lee Friedlander’s Nudes. These paintings are insurgent acts of radical re-authorship wherein the still life’s allegory of life and death takes on a political dimension; they ask us to consider precisely whose lives are held to be valuable and whose are not.
In both bodies of work, Kurland critiques paternal inheritance and the myth of male artistic genius and originality. The nude and the vanitas—one subjugating women, the other transmuting everyday objects into symbols—belong to different worlds. By combining the two genres, Kurland intentionally contaminates the purity of both and asserts the embodied experience of her own hand. Yet the careful craft of her painting reveals her enduring affection for her father. Kurland presents these two bodies of work within the context of her wider series SCUMB, a disruptive, tactile reimagining of the photographic canon. The artist initiated the project as a purge, extracting the raw photographic-corporeal material from her personal library of photo books and using it to make collages as an act of excision and reclamation. Collage has long been associated with women’s labor and the domestic at large, making it a formidable feminist strategy in life and in art. Each work in the series presented by Galerie Miranda is at once a literal dismemberment of the patriarchy and a gendered inversion of the usual terms of possession.
Mariah Robertson's new work presented at Galerie Miranda is an installation that prefigures a forthcoming artist book. Since 2016, Mariah Robertson has been developing risographs for a book project that now exceeds 300 pages. Departing from the rigorous abstraction of her darkroom practice, the new project brings together drawings, photographs, notes, and images from multiple bodies of work into a visual book, without texts, that has gradually evolved into an indirect self-portrait. Organized through recurring chapters and themes, the book incorporates material gathered over nearly a decade of artistic and personal inquiry. The risograph editions in this exhibition are drawn directly from a chapter exploring the male nude. Robertson writes, “It’s asking so little of one’s self to conflate personal desire and inspiration without incorporating the fruits of analytical thinking and self-awareness.” In a visual stream of consciousness, Mariah Robertson's risographs are installed unframed at Galerie Miranda, in a jubilant, color-graduated wall frieze.
In contrast to Robertson’s established practice of unique photographic works, made during a highly physical darkroom protocol, the risographs are an editioned body of work. Robertson's choice of risograph printing for this new work questions market norms of art production, valorisation and display. A risograph printer looks like a photocopier but works as a screenprinter, producing vibrant prints affordably and with little impact to our environment. It evokes the Xerox Art or Copy Art movement of the 1960s, that was particularly adopted by women artists who used it to challenge the dominant model of artistic production and creation of value. With Xerography, an infinitely and mechanically reproducible image was as a threat to the celebrated and often masculine works of abstract expressionism. Xerographic images subverted the photocopier’s intended office use (by secretaries) to produce compositions, information and distribution circuits that challenged the artistic and political status quo.
MARIAH ROBERTSON (1975, American)
Mariah Robertson is a New York-based artist whose work explores the systems, rules, and assumptions inherent in photographic practice. Using the darkroom as a space for improvisation and performance, she appropriates chance, scale, and material constraints to probe broader questions about authority, value, and social structures: “There is no image, only a trace on each page of what happened on it.”
Her darkroom work is created according to a highly experimental protocol: the artist applies photographic chemistry directly to the paper, disregarding the usual and “sacred” rules of photography such as the prohibition against touching the photographic paper, the prohibition against creases or other minor imperfections on the paper's surface, and the prohibition against working with uncontrolled light or temperature.
Mariah Robertson received her BFA from University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. She has participated in the exhibitions A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and Process and Abstraction at the Cleveland Museum of Art's Transformer Station, The Sky’s the Limit, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Solo exhibitions include Mariah Robertson at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK and Mariah Robertson: Let's Change at Grand Arts, Kansas City. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
Mariah Robertson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Alongside her exhibitions, Robertson has co-founded two artist-run spaces and created The Free Art School, a podcast offering teaching and dialogue for artists.
JUSTINE KURLAND (1969, American)
Justine Kurland is an American artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Kurland has spent more than three decades exploring themes of freedom, belonging, utopian desire, and resistance to dominant cultural narratives. In recent years, Kurland has expanded her practice through collage, painting and artist books. Her latest and ongoing series SCUMB Manifesto revisits and transforms books by canonized male photographers through acts of cutting, dismantling, and reconstruction. Drawing on feminist histories of protest and reclamation, these works simultaneously critique the exclusions embedded within photographic canons and create new visual spaces for women and other underrepresented subjects. Through processes of destruction and repair, Kurland reconfigures inherited narratives and proposes alternative histories of photography.
Justine Kurland obtained her B.F.A. in 1996 from the New York City School of Visual Arts and her MFA in 1998 from Yale University. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and internationally and is held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Kurland has published several books, notably Highway Kind (Aperture, 2016); Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2018); SCUMB (Mack, 2022); 99 Nude Collages on the Wall (self-published/artist book, 2025). She has taught at taught at various colleges and universities in and around New York, including Parsons School of Design, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and the International Center of Photography.
