Untitled

Base in New York, Marlo Pascual uses everyday photographs left behind by the passing of time, blows them up and repurposes them in somewhat surreal installations. Her source images are folded, cut, or adorned with props such as rocks, neon lighting and pot plants; the memories hinted at within the pictures are newly interpreted and mysterious narratives seem to emerge. In Untitled, a photograph of a girl standing before a curtain has been vertically folded so as to obscure her face, and much of her body. We barely glimpse her brown hair; her legs are hidden in such a way that her attenuated form appears to hover in the air. The fold in the photograph mirrors the folds of the curtain, adding an unsettling formal instability that troubles the boundary between surface and real space. There is a certain violence in the gesture of folding – a person’s image elided, perhaps, in reaction to painful or embittered memory – but this sense of aggression or censorship contrasts with the careful, framed presentation of the image, monumentalised and preserved beneath its glass. The girl has not been allowed to disappear completely. The warped photograph takes on an elegiac tenor, as suppression and sadness intertwine to moving, disorientating and even ghostly effect.