Untold Fairytale
ARTIST STATEMENT
Untold Fairytale is a performative photography series exploring motherhood, self-identification and femininity through playful self-portraits. The sudden emigration wrenched me from the calm and comfortable life of a middle-aged architect into the one of an exile in a new land, where I turned to photography as a way of holding my family together, of inventing possibilities for new ways of existence. I began constructing a private, fairy-tale world, which only my two daughters have access to. The world where the boundaries of possibility dissolve, identity, reality, and imagination become blurred, the feminine fantasyland sprung from the bedtime tales mothers weave for their children. We are playing with folk tales archetypes, haunted, mystical, grotesque, yet the characters and scenes do not replicate any existing stories, our fairytale is still untold. My daughters and I grew up on old Russian fairytales, which are filled with mystery, often frightening, and saturated with the darker undercurrents of human nature. This dark mystery seems to linger in the edges of the project’s photographs, offering a spectral frame to the visual narrative. The deliberately unhidden elements of a makeshift, low-budget photo studio introduce a Barthesian “third meaning” into the series. This work is my means of coping with the despondency and fear of emigration and an opportunity to share play with my daughters and leave them with lasting memories of the time we spent together during this difficult chapter of our lives.
ARTIST BIO
Mari Saxon is a Russian-born conceptual photographer based in the USA since 2022. Rooted in academic art education and long-term architectural practice, she constructs her visual language through staged compositions, working in the field of magical realism and performative photography. Her imagery is conceived scenographically, and employs ironic allusions to classical painting, play, absurdity, and complex symbolism as key visual strategies. Saxon engages with themes of motherhood, female subjectivity, displacement, and self-identification. Her work has been recognized through top prizes in international photography competitions, and has been selected for global portfolios, museum exhibitions, and biennials and festivals across the United States and internationally, and is held in private collections. She has been commissioned by institutions including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Assets for Artists, and TurnPark Art Space.