Curated by Thomas Beachdel
Marie Tomanová, from Mikulov, Czech Republic, received her MFA in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno before moving to New York City and turning to photography. Living in the United States, far from home, displacement, identity, and memory became key themes in her work. At the Moravian Gallery, Tomanová has focused on identity, particularly that of Kate. The exhibition offers a glimpse of Tomanová’s continued work with Kate from 2017 to the present, working in the longitudinal manner of creating an extended portraiture over time, a process she expands through her work with film and installation.
Tomanová first met Kate in 2017 to take photographs in Kate’s apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived with her new kitten Cashew and her girlfriend Odie. Until then, Tomanová only knew Kate from social media, that she was Czech and living in New York City, something that they both shared. Tomanová deeply identified with Kate on that afternoon and shot a 36-exposure roll of film in the bathroom, which resulted in the widely circulated image, Kate and Odie (2017), the cover of Tomanová’s first book, Young American (2019). The heart of this exhibition is this complete roll of film, in its original sequence, never seen before, and presented as one work, First Roll, Kate and Odie (2025). It stands as a powerful testament to Tomanová’s openness and transparency as a photographer. First Roll is a sequence of moments that closely connect with one another; it is cinematic, but it is also still. There is an intimacy and closeness. The mediation between the photographic and cinematic (filmic)—between single image and sequence—allows for a complex picture of the experience of that afternoon in 2017 to occur. As an art historian, my mind wanders to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), and if one leaves the heavy semiotic and conceptual apparatus behind, I can almost see First Roll as one and thirty-six images, or moments. As one roll of film shot within a short space of time in a single location, it represents the culmination, or the narrative, of that experience between three people—Tomanová, Kate, and Odie. And at the same time, each individual frame is itself an instant that does not need the others to exist—and that is the power of the photograph, to distill an essence of a point in time, a feeling, an emotion, a moment.
For Tomanová, the experience of taking the photograph is the most powerful part of the process of photography, and one could even argue that the resulting photograph itself is less important to her than the connection and experience of working with others. The photograph is simply a trace of that interaction. And this is why Tomanová was so compelled to present First Roll,Kate and Odie in her first solo museum exhibition. That day in 2017, that time with Kate, was a foundational and formative moment for her as a young photographer and the beginning of their long photographic collaboration.
The photographs in First Roll have led to a short film called Kate 2025 (21:01) in which Kate looks at the photographs from 2017 for the first time in 8 years and discusses how she has changed as a person—her identity. The project thus forms a deep, extended, or expanded, portrait linking past to present and, ultimately, future. As she looks at images of her own body and Odie, from whom she is now divorced, Kate’s monologue begins simply, speaking about the surface of things. But moved by the images, Kate speaks about who she really is, about her coming out in Prague, her relationships, and who she is now versus who she was then, as a 22-year-old, and her emotional and physical transformations.
The choice of Kate for the exhibition is not incidental. It is about empowerment—Tomanová’s own and others’. She creates an exhibition around Kate because she can. She creates an exhibition for Kate and for you. It is about a love, a relationship, a support that perhaps Tomanová herself had lacked for so long in her struggles as a young artist, especially in Brno. This tracing of the self and overcoming adversity is a fascinating way of viewing Kate, For You as an exhibition. I cannot help but think of that 1988 Guerrilla Girls piece, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. Tomanová’s presentation of Kate is as Kate, without the political language of gender, or sexuality, etc. Kate may be a lot of things, and not one of them defines her absolutely. I also think of a quotation by James Baldwin, “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.” The experience of Kate is exactly that so much more. It is a communion with spirit, the same spirit that animates you and me — Thomas Beachdel