Alison Rossiter: Semblance: Press Release and Images

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.