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Gallery director and artist Natalie Tyler
Natalia Zukerman
The term “the female gaze” is attributed to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who, in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” named what Hollywood had long taken for granted: the camera — and by extension, the viewer — was aligned with a masculine subjectivity. Women existed on-screen largely as objects, not agents.
In the decades since, the “female gaze” has evolved into something more expansive. It signals authorship, yes, but also empathy, subjectivity, and the refusal to flatten lived experience into familiar tropes. It is not simply the opposite of the male gaze; it is another way of seeing altogether.
Mad Rose’s eight featured photographers explore this premise across mediums, histories and sensibilities using diverse approaches to challenge conventional narratives. The response has been so positive that the exhibit has been extended through Dec. 28.
Artist Ava PellorNatalia Zukerman
The tour began with Ava Pellor, whose large black-and-white portraits of bodies in nature rely on trust. She explained that she photographs with a tripod or a Rolleiflex so she “never breaks the connection with the subject.” The goal isn’t voyeurism, she said, but agency.
“What really shocks me is when people say, ‘I’ve never been photographed by a woman before,’ and then they thank me for letting them be who they are,” she explained. “That’s why I photograph the nude, to almost desexualize the female body, or the human body in general.”
The work explores the symbiotic, inseparable relationship between bodies and the natural world. “To live symbolically is to remember we are not apart from nature, but a continuation of it,” said Pellor.
Across from Pellor hang glossy and colorful images by internationally renowned fashion and costume designer, Han Feng. Co-founder of Mad Rose Neal Rosenthal spoke of her work saying, “I find her work exceptionally expressive and beautiful.”
Artist Jan MeissnerNatalia Zukerman
Next was Jan Meissner, a writer who discovered the camera could tell stories she couldn’t write. Her early-2000s street photographs were taken in Soho. “I’ve never staged a photograph in my life,” she said. Revisiting the images now was strange, she admitted, depictions of a city that no longer exists.“I don’t think I could make these photographs anymore. The terrain has changed and I have changed. It was a moment in time, and I thank Mad Rose for sending me back there.”
An abstract photographer and longtime human rights lawyer, Pamela Takiff brings a different kind of witnessing. Her work begins with overlooked textures — broken glass, peeling paint —then pares away context so the viewer’s imagination takes over.
A Guggenheim Fellow and recent Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Barbara Bosworth’s black-and-white images were made with her 8x10 camera. “I began looking for light in the darkness,” she wrote of the work, which circles family, land, and the thin veil between presence and memory.
Artist Beatrice PediconiNatalia Zukerman
Beatrice Pediconi’s work spans drawing, photography, painting and video, all organized around her investigations of water as medium. She describes the pieces on view, created between 2009 and 2016, as explorations of “the fragility of all life, highlighting its ephemeral condition.”
Barbara Woike, who spent 33 years as a news photo editor with the Associated Press, offered both history and perspective as she guided visitors through her nearly 50-year-old portraits. “All of these photographs were shot almost 50 years ago,” she said. All pre-digital, all grounded in the subject itself. “Back in the day, photography was more about realism. Even if an abstract picture was shot, it was still shot from something very real — a leaf, a pepper, a naked body twisted so that you’d pause and ask, ‘What is this?’ before realizing it was a body.”
Artist Barbara WoikeNatalia Zukerman
Woike’s career, she explained, grew from that foundation. When digital photography arrived, she witnessed its shift firsthand but stayed true to the ethos of capturing the moment. “Even though photography went digital, there was no alteration of images. I could have been fired for moving a Coca-Cola can out of a picture.”
Her work, she emphasized, has always been about the subject, not the photographer. “The work was about subject matter, not about me. Back then, people still argued whether photography was art at all. Someone might look at these pictures,” she said, gesturing to Beatrice Pediconi’s abstractions across the gallery, “and ask, ‘Is it photography?’ It’s about light, and what light can put into an image.”
Many of Woike’s subjects are no longer alive. “Some I never followed, others I knew until the day they died. That’s the power of portraiture — it lets people stay alive.”
One image holds particular weight: a portrait of Katherine “Sissy” Wells, the first trans person Woike met. When Woike posted the photograph on Facebook to mark what would have been Wells’ 108th birthday, hundreds of people responded with memories. In capturing Wells, Woike did more than preserve a face — she reframed perception, reminding viewers that the story beneath the image, like light through glass, is what makes it real.
The tour ended with Rosenthal speaking about his partner and gallery co-founder, Kerry Madigan’s work. Madigan, who has been making photographs since the 1970s, is experiencing aphasia due to cognitive impairment. Her images, preserved memories, form what Rosenthal described as “a bit of a travelogue of our experiences together traveling all over the world.”
Guests were then invited upstairs for the Mad Rose Winter Salon, featuring the work of local artists at various stages of their careers. Once again, viewers were reminded that perspective is never fixed. It shifts depending on where you stand, what you know, and who is doing the seeing.
