Scott Offen
MFA ’24 Photography
“Grace” is an ongoing collaborative project between my partner Grace and myself. The work challenges the dynamics of authorship, gender, aging, and representation through a sustained photographic practice. Our images are constructed through a deliberate and reciprocal process in which Grace acts as an equal collaborator and co-author. Together, we create scenes that operate at the intersection of the real, the symbolic, and the psychological.
Grace moves in the untamed wilderness, embodying mythological and symbolic roles that blur the boundaries between reality, imagination, and the natural world. This work offers viewers an invitation to step beyond societal norms and experience an alternate realm of freedom and transformation. We explore imagination, play, and the possible meanings of the natural world, escaping from the bonds of this dimension with its cultural norms and strictures on our behaviors—especially those imposed on older women.
The natural landscape—primarily the rural environments of New England—function in the series as more than a backdrop. It is a character, contributing to the narrative structure of the work and complicating the boundaries between figure and ground, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman. In these spaces, Grace enacts a range of roles—often solitary, ambiguous, and archetypal—that unsettle fixed ideas of femininity, visibility, and domesticity.
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Scott Offen is an East Coast photographer whose work has been widely exhibited and prominently featured online. His first monograph, Grace, was published by L’Artiere in 2025, the same year he presented his first solo exhibition at The Curator Lab in Chelsea, New York City. Scott received the Graduate Thesis Award in 2024. Working collaboratively with his wife, they create images of an older woman that immerse viewers in a fairytale land where logic and responsibility vanish.
