Marina Ross’s paintings are richly layered reinterpretations of iconic imagery from The Wizard of Oz, recast through the lens of cultural memory, personal grief, and the performance of femininity. Drawing on her experience of immigration from the former Soviet Union to the American Midwest, Ross explores the mythology of the American Dream through an emotionally charged visual language—one that blurs nostalgia with loss, illusion with vulnerability. This ongoing body of work was shaped in the aftermath of a deep personal tragedy, becoming a framework through which Ross processes emotional upheaval. Working in serial repetition, she revisits the figure of Dorothy Gale with subtle shifts in tone and form. In one canvas, Dorothy is luminous and hopeful; in another, she fades into spectral abstraction. These variations operate like rehearsals or rituals, allowing Ross to recite visual lines with different emotional inflections. The act of painting becomes both a performance and a reckoning. Ross’s palette—dominated by oxidized teals, seafoam greens, and iridescent washes—echoes the patina of aged film and weathered architecture, underscoring the tension between time’s erosion and cinema’s illusion of permanence. Starting from film stills projected onto canvas, she layers, blurs, and reconfigures her surfaces to push background into distance while pulling painterly gestures forward. The resulting images maintain a ghostly echo of their cinematic origins, yet are destabilized—figures blur, dissolve, or vanish, reflecting the fragility of memory and the instability of form. Haunting, intimate, and imbued with a dreamlike sensibility, Ross’s paintings invite viewers into a shifting space where past and present, grief and myth, vulnerability and beauty coexist.
