Rosetta Whitehead's photographs are mysterious, sensual and technically accomplished. During the sometimes extremely long exposures, she seems to reveal the aura of her sitters or summon up strange streams of ectoplasm.
Each photoshoot is a collaborative/performative event and, seeing the complexity of the finished works, it can be hard to believe that no photo editing software is used to create them.
Rosetta has been developing her technique over a number of years and continues to push the boundaries of her chosen medium. In the current exhibition, the photographs are presented in a variety of sizes, laminated to aluminium in a frameless contemporary style.
Gallery 286 has a long history of working with light art and holography, being one of the few spaces worldwide to exhibit the latter on a regular basis. The director, Jonathan Ross, has one of the world’s most extensive collections of holograms and met Rosetta Whitehead’s father, Peter, a celebrated film maker and author, following Whitehead’s publication of his book, The Risen (subtitle “A Holographic Novel”) in 1994. Rosetta herself has an interest in holography and collaborated with artists in that field before finding her own métier with Light Painting.