SARASOTA, FLA.- Flowers become subjects of unexpected intensity in Marsha Kazarinov-Owett’s: Blowing in the Wind, a new photographic exhibition running through January 22 at Alfstad& Contemporary.

“Marsha focuses her camera on the same content photographers have been shooting for nearly 200 years – flowers,” says Sam Alfstad. “Yet her images are startling new.”

In her first Sarasota showing, the artist displays 29 images captured with long exposures – three single-shot images and six sequential series shot as the flowers blew back and forth in the wind. The resulting streaks of color create a turbulence of emotional uncertainty, a feeling of being flung about on the whims of atmospheric forces.

“The camera captures forms which typically move faster than the eye can process,” says Kazarinov-Owett, “because the human eye is constantly changing focus in order to see three dimensions.”

In her photographs, Kazarinov-Owett suggests brushstrokes through in-camera movements that draw on her training in Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism.

“The photographs in the show display Marsha’s fascination with peripheral vision and spatial compositions of light and reflection,” says Alfstad. “Each dazzles.”

She weaves these fragments together through an exhaustive editing process, first shooting hundreds of images and then transitioning the images from lens, to screen, to physical space.

“I am nature’s curator,” says Karaninov-Owett. “I do not disturb or rearrange what I photograph.”

Marsha Kazarinov-Owett: Blowing in the Wind runs December 12 – January 22.

Growing up in the 1970s in Soviet-Era Moscow, radicalism was a fundamental part of Marsha Kazarinov-Owett's early education. With a father who was a physicist and a mother who collected art, anti-government intellectuals and nonconformist artists often visited the family home. Through projects like the Bulldozer Exhibition and illegal salons, risking violent conflicts was a part of everyday life. The Kazarinovs were exiled to the United States in 1977.

Kazarinov-Owett went on to study and paint in the East Village in the 1980s, later moving to Springs, East Hampton, former home of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and other pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, which would inform art-making throughout her life. In the Springs where she developed a technique of action painting with sandpaper, finding images by removing layers of paint from wood panels. In the past decade, this visceral, reductive approach has carried over to her photographic process of discovering visual arrangements in thousands of photographs taken from the landscape of New York City, where she currently resides.

Her work has appeared in solo shows at Splashlight Gallery, the Muse Center of Photography and Moving Image and Alfstad& Contemporary, as well as in group exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, Northern-Southern and Underline Gallery, among others. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, site95 journal and Deep Sleep Magazine, and earlier this year, she co-curated a group exhibition “MIMIC: A group exhibition about mimicry, illusion, and material transformation in art” at Air Circulation Gallery with critic Paddy Johnson.