Vanessa Marsh

Press and Publications

(click on the bold text below for links)

9/20/2021 an interview and feature in Analog Forever Magazine was published and released in late November 2021. Info here.

1/30/2019 Karla Kane of the Palo Alto Weekly reviews The Sheltering Sky at Palo Alto Art Center:

The most striking art in the exhibition may be Vanessa Marsh's chromogenic photograms, created using a combination of darkroom techniques, collage, drawing and painting.

11/21/17 Ellyn Kail wrote about my series Everywhere All at Once for Featureshoot.com:

The drawings each have their own stories, but to some extent, they’re all pulled from the artist’s past. The ferris wheel, like the evergreen trees, is part of her childhood menagerie. She pulled another landscape straight from photographs of a friend’s wedding.

4/11/2017 Maria Porges reviews Falling for Squarecylinder.com:

Once upon a time, we felt ourselves falling — an experience Marsh’s haunting images recall, over and over, with tender elegiac grace.

4/2/2017 Eli Anapur previews Falling opening April 8th at Dolby Chadwick Gallery:

Marsh focuses on cosmological and geologic time, creating otherworldly landscapes that entice with their light and color, shining through a deep night.

3/30/2017 Sura Wood recommends Falling at Dolby Chadwick Gallery:

In the most recent iteration of her Falling series, Vanessa Marsh embraces the cosmos and geologic time in large-scale nocturnal landscapes that communicate the wonder of the universe.

11/13/16 Ann Jastrab wrote about my series Falling for AllAboutPhoto.com:

The work from her series, "Falling" began at RayKo Photo Center when she was a resident artist a few years ago. She had applied for the residency program with a series of b&w images of carefully designed man-made and natural landscapes with a strangely brilliant night sky behind them. Too real to be real. So perfect and so strange.

10/8/2015 Sura Wood reviews Femme Papel at RayKo Photo Center for the Bay Area Reporter:

The work benefits from the bare-bones context at RayKo, where the grandeur of her nocturnal landscape, a night of 1,000 starts, interrupted only by the silhouettes of distant peaks and the splash of a metallic violet nebula in space, is even more dazzling.

10/6/2015 Aline Smithson reviews Femme Papel at RayKo Photo Center on Lenscratch:

Vanessa Marsh has been hunkering down in the RayKo darkrooms for more than a year since her artist residency ended

8/24/2015 Maria Proges reviews Night Begins the Day on SquareCylinder.com

Vanessa Marsh’s astonishing photograms show galaxies and auroras of gorgeous swirling stars over a horizon of mountains, all of which is completely made up, -fabricated by hand, rather than recorded by a camera’s lens.

8/04/2015 Michael Franco writes about my series Falling for CNET's Tech Culture section

Artist Vanessa Marsh makes beautiful photos of skies filled with star and nebula, but she does it without a camera- or a sky.

8/4/2014 Nathaniel Ainley writes about new images from Falling on Vice's The Creators Project

[Exclusive] These Cosmic Landscape Photos Were Created Without a Camera

7/30/2015 Taylor Glascock of WIRED writes about my series Falling.

These Photos of Starry Nights Aren’t of Starry Nights

7/17/2015 Nancy Ewart of the Examiner reviews Night Begins the Day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum:

"Vanessa Marsh looks at the night sky though her Chromogenic photograms - fabricated images which are composed of multiple layers of vibrant collage, an imaginary construction of distant galaxies, a beautiful “nocturne” as explained in the catalog. The photograms are a visual representation of what millions of Star Trek fans feel when they hear the opening sentence of the series - "to boldly go." In this case, the "go to" is manufactured here on earth but none the less awe inspiring."

7/1/2015 Jonathan Curiel SF Weekly reviews Night Beings the Day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum:

""Night Begins the Day" connects the dots among works that are complementary and challenging as art. Images of nuclear explosions that create mushroom clouds of centrifugal force (Michael Light's 100 Suns) are side-by-side with otherworldly photograms of the night sky with mountains (Vanessa Marsh's Falling). Marsh's cosmos is manufactured. Light's found explosions were just underground tests. Both are versions of reality that are wildly distorted. You feel alone in front of them, and it's this isolation — a beautiful isolation that some people would describe as "transcendent" — that's inculcated throughout "Night Begins the Day," starting with Peter Alexander's PA & PE."

6/28/2015 Aline Smithson features my work on Lenscratch:

"Her images are camera-les creations filled with magic, beauty and mystery."

6/22/2015 Cathy Bowman of the SF Examiner reviews Night Beings the Day:

"Highlights include three photograms by Oakland artist Vanessa Marsh. Using a complex process that involves photography, painting and paper cut outs, Marsh has created stunning works portraying velvety black mountains against a star-filled night sky."

6/28/2015 Matthew Strebe of The Culture Trip review Night Beings the Day:

"Vanessa Marsh’s Mountains series backs away from mortality while jumping headfirst into illusion. Her beautiful nighttime vistas appear to be photographs, but are in reality a 'complex combination of drawings, cut paper, and reverse color paintings on mylar.' The effect is spectacular, the subterfuge brilliant."

6/21/2015 John Held Jr. of SFAQ reviews Night Beings the Day at the Jewish Museum:

"The lens is focused upwards towards the heavens in the photographs of Vanessa Marsh. Hers is a nighttime sky arrayed with stars, from which she explores, “the intersections of man made, natural and cosmological power through a mixed media process based in photography.” Her artistic struggle occurs in the darkroom, where Marsh envisions the nighttime as a perpetual Aurora Borealis. They are stunning photographs that convey an unnatural grandeur."

2/23/2015 Sarah Coolidge interviewed me for ZYZZYVA's Blog:

Reimagining Landscape, Q&A with Photographer Vanessa Marsh

2/4/2015 Nirmala Nataraj of The SF Chronicle reviews Everywhere All at Once at Dolby Chadwick Gallery:

"Marsh’s new show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, titled “Everywhere All at Once,” offers a series of (works) that evoke the haunting, moody and often personal associations we have with cosmic phenomena...which include photogramic techniques, summon themes of memory, isolation and the incredible vastness of nature."

12/23/2014 Becky Chung of PDN's Photo of the Day writes about Falling:

"Oakland-based artist Vanessa Marsh created galaxies and nightscapes by combining painting, drawing and darkroom techniques. These large-format C-prints envelop the viewer, transporting them into the universe."

12/2011     IntheMake Artist Profile, by Nikki Grattan and Klea McKenna, IntheMake.net

"The physicality of her work; the layering strategy of her drawings for each piece, the arrangement of the models, and the shadowy images that she creates all seem to mirror a central thought— that our sense of place in our environment, our belonging and understanding, is an inconstant, volatile and fragile foothold, at best. And, that it’s not just our foothold that’s shaky, but the land itself."