Live for the Weather

Marie Tomanova

Marie Tomanova is a Czech artist and photographer based in New York City. Critic John Berger wrote, ‘To emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments’.

Like for many other people, emigrating to the United States was the most significant decision in Tomanova’s life. Displacement, place, community, self, and memory became the key themes in her photographic work, first in her self-portraiture (ongoing since 2014), then in her Young American portraits (ongoing since 2015) – two series which bring her into contact with others and allow her to see herself in the context of the American landscape and society – and likewise, finally, in her latest body of work, It Was Once My Universe (ongoing since 2018), about her return home to the Czech Republic after eight years away.

The exhibition ‘Live For The Weather’ brings together all of these themes. Her images confront us directly and without artifice with the power of people simply being. It is about tolerance, acceptance, identification. It is about optimism, youth, and humanness.