Portraiture and a focus on the human presence make up the vast majority of Marois’ portfolio. These photographs often act as a deconstructive narrative of temporal human experience, allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions of the depicted visual imagery as demonstrated by her series Sans Titre. As she enters the confined breathing spaces of her subject, she explores the boundaries between interior and exterior narratives while simultaneously blurring the lines between the two, often revealing personal characteristics of strength, vulnerability and isolation. Dynamic and teeming with intensity, her portraits seek to extract a singular raw, visceral moment of human emotion resulting in evocative yet sober representations of her subjects. This in turn allows the viewer to experience a liberating moment of truth about her protagonist, an important aspect for Marois’ personal artistic motivations. However, the play between factual reality and the fictitious construction of the image create an ever-evolving dialogue between the viewer and the subject in the portrait. Ultimately, her figures are left with their private thoughts and interior turmoil; however the artist’s portraits provide a visually arresting record of events which leave the viewer to ponder their own private narrative.


In her landscape works, Marois expands on her work in portraiture and delves into the physical and personal terrain. Questions of interior and exterior narratives are once again present in these works where natural, geographical landscapes reflect emotional, private ones which bring to light the interconnectivity of all life systems. By stitching portraits with environmental scenery, Marois calls attention to the sublime and cinematic qualities of land and the very real existence of these qualities in the human spirit. These photographs, shot in a wide format though physically, spatially close to the subject, are provocative and enigmatic: they free the subject from the confining interior spaces found in her portrait series’ and allow them freedom en plein air.


In the large breadth of Marois’ work, her role as artist can be described as the surveyor: she peacefully enters the living spaces of her subjects, is allowed a truthful peek into their private lives, and quietly takes her leave as if her camera lens had never been there in the first place. Affective and sober, Marois’ photographs provoke the innermost kind of personal reflection and capture moments of true emotion and the perils of human existential experience. The ancillary circumstances of her photographs are so fleeting and momentary that their temporality is almost physically inscribed into the image through movement and imagery that extends past the frame, but that is another story reserved for another image yet to be told by Marois.


Written by Olivia C. Pipe