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| Caption Sheet | Press Release | |
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Artwork Images
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Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Wellington & Ward Ltd, T. Illingworth & Co. Ltd. Slogas, Boots Pure Drug Co. Ltd. 20th Century Self-toning, ca. 1920s (1), 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 16 9/16" x 12 9/16" (42 x 32 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Wellington & Ward Ltd, T. Illingworth & Co. Ltd. Slogas, Boots Pure Drug Co. Ltd. 20th Century Self-toning, ca. 1920s (2), 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 16 9/16" x 12 9/16" (42 x 32 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Wellington & Ward Ltd, T. Illingworth & Co. Ltd. Slogas, Boots Pure Drug Co. Ltd. 20th Century Self-toning, ca. 1920s (3), 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 16 9/16" x 12 9/16" (42 x 32 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Silvered Darko (Sears Roebuck & Company), exact expiration date unknown ca. 1900s, processed 2016, 2025
Two Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 11 15/16” x 15" (30.5 x 38 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Guilleminot-Boespflug & Cie, Etoile, ca.1930s / Gevaert Larjex, ca.1950s, 2025
Two Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 18 1/4" x 11 3/8" (46 x 29 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Imperial Dry Plate Co. Ltd Imperial P.O.P. mauve, exact expiration date unknown, ca 1910s, processed 2017, and Ansco Cyko, expired July 1st 1912, processed 2017, 2025
Two Gelatin Silver PrintsFramed: 17 13/16” x 11 7/16” (45 x 29 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Daguerre, Baekeland, 19th century (5), 2024
Daguerreotype Plate and Gelatin Silver Print
Framed: 14 15/16" x 11 15/16" (38 x 30 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Daguerre, Baekeland, 19th century (6), 2024
Daguerreotype Plate and Gelatin Silver Print
Framed: 14 15/16" x 11 15/16" (38 x 30 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Unknown manufacturer Gaslicht – Papier, ca. 1910s, processed 2024, 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 33 3/8" x 25 5/8" (85 x 65 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Nepera Chemical Company Velox, ca.1899, processed 2024, 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 22 3/8" x 18 3/8" (57 x 47 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Eastman Kodak Nepera Velox, expired 1912, processed 2024, 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 25 5/16" x 21 3/8" (64 x 54 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Tapestry - Unknown manufacturer Gaslicht – Papier – Normal, ca.1910s,
processed 2024, 2025
Sixteen Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 28 7/8" x 21 3/8" (73 x 54 cm)
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Alison Rossiter
Eastman Kodak, Portrait Bromide, expired June 1st, 1937, processed 2025, 2025
Two Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 15” x 21 1/8” (38 x 53.5 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Eastman Kodak, Azo Hard E, expired September 1919, processed 2018, 2025
Nine Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 21 5/16” x 15 1/2” (54 x 39.5 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Wellington & Ward, S.C.P., manufactured ca. 1910s, processed 2023, 2025
Nine Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 17 3/4” x 14 13/16” (45 x 35 cm) -
Alison Rossiter
Semblance, Man Ray Tapestry, (Mimosa, Radiotyp, manufactured ca. 1930s, processed 2023), 2025
Twelve Gelatin Silver Prints
Framed: 23 3/4" x 15 11/6” (60.5 x 40 cm)
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Press Release
Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Semblance, Alison Rossiter’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, which will be on view from Thursday, January 15, through Saturday, March 14, 2026. An artist's reception celebrating the show will be held from 6-8 PM on Thursday, January 22, 2026. The show coincides with the two-artist exhibition Temporal: Catherine Burgess and Alison Rossiter at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, curated by Catherine Crowston, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Alison Rossiter (b. 1953; Jackson, MS) grounds her work in an expansive personal library of expired vintage and antique photo papers, directing a cameraless photography practice that intersects darkroom processes and archival research. Rossiter selects examples from this collection, which she strategically develops, exploiting each paper’s extant capacity to render areas of light and dark. In her own words, Rossiter calls her practice one of “finding;” a careful approach in which she intuits composition while embracing imperfection as inherent to her chemically complex medium. In the exhibition Semblance, the artist employs these methods to weigh progress and inspiration, grounding them in an allegiance between the black-and-white mechanics of her work and its echoes of Photographic, Minimalist, and Abstract Expressionist art. Drawing on source materials that largely originate from a range spanning the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, Rossiter channels the artistic movements that unfolded across their lifetimes.
In a series of works which feature the oldest materials on view, titled Daguerre, Baekeland, Rossiter matches elements in simple vertical compositions. The artist shares: “I have paired anonymous, unsuccessful daguerreotype plates from the mid-nineteenth century with sheets of Velox photographic development paper from the late-nineteenth century in honor of the inventions of Louis Daguerre and Leo Baekeland. The Daguerreotype introduced photography to the world, and Velox paper empowered the new amateur photographer.” Every plate is highly unique, with obliterated surfaces bearing mottled imagery that resembles Abstract Expressionist works in miniature. These are oriented as though elevated by crisp, light papers toned at their edges by time. In conversation, the works’ elements demonstrate a turning point in the emergence of technologies, and in form, they echo segmented paintings like those by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, or Ellsworth Kelly, building overarching narratives of artistic and scientific development.
Rossiter makes these deliberate art historical allusions to elaborate on her materials’ evolving social contexts. This exhibition debuts Semblance, Man Ray Tapestry, a body of work in which Rossiter calls directly on a specific early artwork by artist Man Ray (1890-1976). Rossiter explains: “Tapestry, 1911, by Man Ray was the first piece installed at the entrance of the alias Man Ray exhibition at The Jewish Museum in 2009. This oddly beautiful textile work is the premise for my Semblance, Man Ray Tapestry pieces. Man Ray used fabric samples from the family tailoring business as material for his sewn construction. An abundant supply of gaslight photographic papers from the 1910s-1920s allows me to make assemblages with Tapestry, 1911, in mind.” Preceding Rossiter’s practice by more than a century, Man Ray experimented in material abstraction with what was available in his environment. He would go on in the 1920s to seek a unifying language for art through abstraction in the wake of the social and political upheaval of the First World War—a period when many of the materials comprising Rossiter’s work already existed. In her own medium, Rossiter elaborates on Man Ray’s 1911 textile overture. In doing so, the artist weighs the uncertainty of her own time and responds in a language that did, ultimately, come to be shared.
Like many photographers who came before her, Rossiter is drawn to what is unique within each sheet of paper, whether that be its novelty as a dated product, or the ways time has changed it in the present day. Some of the varied specimens Rossiter uses are photo emulsions on linen, others were manufactured with early synthetic dyes or silvered with aluminum powder; all are reminders of the tension inherent to media that are fragile, yet technologically progressive. Throughout the works in the exhibition Semblance, numerous prints show silver mirroring—a decades-long change in which the metallic silver tarnishes into foggy, luminous tones upon the paper surfaces. The mirrored reflectivity is also symbolic of the significant decades since their creation and expiration, and of the artists working during the period, echoing the concerns of their moment. “When I hold one of these prints,” Rossiter shares, “it’s like I’m time traveling to the 1920s.” This body of work, in its retrospection and tribute, inevitably looks to possibility.
Works by Alison Rossiter are held in the permanent collections of major public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. In 2024, Rossiter’s Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1930s, processed 2020 (#2) was acquired by Fotomuseum, Antwerp, Belgium, where it played a key role in the exhibition Outdated Paper? Photographic Papers from the Gevaert Archive. In late 2025, (#3) from the same series was acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Alison Rossiter has mounted solo and two-artist exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; Station Kasseler Fotoforum, Kassel, Germany; Columbus College of Art and Design, OH; and Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie, France, among others. In 2017, Yossi Milo and Radius Books co-published Rossiter’s first monograph, Expired Paper, followed by Compendium 1898-1919 in 2020 with the New York Public Library following Rossiter’s inclusion in Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works. Rossiter lives and works in the New York major metropolitan area. -
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