About Marsha Kazarinov-Owett
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 conflict was a part of everyday life. Not surprisingly, 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 she moved to Springs, East Hampton, the area of Long Island where Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and other pioneers of Abstract Expressionism lived and painted. The move would inform art-making throughout her life. In the Springs 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 she co-curated a group exhibition “MIMIC: A group exhibition about mimicry, illusion and material transformation in art” at Air Circulation Gallery in Brooklyn with critic and editor of Art F City, Paddy Johnson.
