Irina Rozovsky

As part of MoMA’s online exhibition Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020, we’re introducing the work of one participating artist per week, from September 28 through November 16. This week focuses on the work of Irina Rozovsky. The audio recordings below are excerpted from Zoom conversations between curator Lucy Gallun and the artists.

Irina Rozovsky calls her Miracle Center series an “invitation to play with time and visual space.” It comprises a collection of diminutive precious objects—each one a special, multifaceted gem. Rozovsky has inserted her own photographs into decades-old frames that she found on eBay or at antique sales, reinvigorating their luster and lending gravitas and permanence to pictures that may otherwise exist as digital information on her iPhone or in the cloud. In their present form, they’d be at home in a proud cluster on a mantelpiece, or stored for safekeeping in a box under a bed, or cradled in the palm of a hand. Many of the prints are housed in what were once known as “travel frames,” which can be slipped into a suitcase or a coat pocket and carried on journeys to serve as mementos of loved ones at home. Rozovsky also riffs on the photo “bursts” that an iPhone allows (or rather “demands,” as she reminds us, by encouraging a user to “take more and more photos, run out of storage, buy more technology”). She is especially drawn to frames with multiple windows, allowing her to hinge previously unrelated pictures or to assemble images in the manner of a film strip, coming together “like a time lapse.” Rozovsky (American, born Russia, 1981) is based in Athens, Georgia, where she co-runs The Humid, an educational space for photography.

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