LIVE FOR THE WEATHER
2017
Shot on my very first cellphone that I obtained in 2005. I was the first one among my group of friends, in my small town Mikulov, who had a phone with camera. I photographed everything around me. Selfie wasn’t a thing, yet. This is my story before I left to US in the beginning of 2011.
“Marie Tomanova’s multi-media works explore gender, sexuality, and identity through youth culture in the post-communist, global age. Her series Live for the Weather (2017) embodies the carefree spirit of youth in the face of an uncertain future. In forty-eight, low-resolution, NSFW snapshots that can be hung or projected on a wall, Tomanova haphazardly captures with a camera phone her everyday life in her hometown, Mikulov, in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic near the Austrian border. As the legend goes, Tomanova purchased the phone in 2006 with money she earned through an arranged marriage and took photographs with it through 2010. While outmoded by today’s technology, this now primitive tool empowered the artist, allowing her to take charge of her body and its image. In Live for the Weather, Tomanova confidently performs for the camera in various states of undress. Her lovers, friends, and family members mingle in this asynchronous narrative punctuated by the occasional found object, stray dog, and bucolic landscape. It would be reductive to categorize this spectacle of blatant debauchery as a mere embrace of the increasingly popular aesthetic of post-communist chic, branded by subculture icons like Russian fashion designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. Tomanova’s photographs proposition even the most prudish and puritanical viewer with an intimate invitation to a passionate picture of youth in the former Eastern Bloc.”
Ksenia Nouril, PhD for OSMOS Magazine (NYC)