Mariah Doren
Dean of Graduate, Professional and Continuing Education
This series of landscape images play with the idea of scale, value, and vantage point. Moving from warm to cool, macro to micro in order to re-see land around us that seems often unchanging and familiar.
I photograph places that have been manipulated and cultivated, probing the elusive ideal of the “natural.” Working in photographic layers, I reassemble and reimagine what might lie beneath the surface or what be seen — building locations from a collage of photographs, drawings, and printed material. These fragments are deliberately discontinuous and misscaled, so that the logic holding each image together depends not on documentary fact but on association, fantasy, and dreams.
At the same time, the physical surface of each work is deliberately sensuous: waxed, sewn, painted, printed upon. Construction operates in two directions at once — the image is collaged, and the landscape is handmade. Together they insist that landscape is never simply found. It is always already imagined, mediated, and remade.
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Mariah Doren joined MassArt in September 2024 as the Dean of Graduate, Professional, and Continuing Education. She has a studio practice based in photography that includes collage work combining printmaking, drawing, and photographs included in recent exhibitions at the Danforth Museum and The New Britain Museum of American Art. Mariah’s writing includes a book coauthored with Elissa Armstrong: Let’s Talk about Critique: reimagining art and design education, published 2023 and a chapter in Introduction to Design Education by Steven Faerm. Mariah has a Doctorate in College Teaching of Art and Design from Columbia University, an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and a BA in Growth & Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.
