Marisa Portolese earned a BFA with a major in photography (1994) and an MFA (2002) at Concordia University. She has been an associate professor of photography at that university since 2000. She has had exhibitions in Canada and Europe, including Berlin and Palermo, and in the United States, in New York and San Francisco.
Artwork description
The triptych is composed of three photographs. On the left is a white swan at a watering hole. In the centre, a child dressed in a white dress stands in a green field and reaches out to the viewer. To the right, an exotic white bird is perched in a tropical forest. The swan evokes elegance, serenity and stability, whereas the bird on the right expresses freedom, carefreeness, and flight. According to the artist, one represents reality and the other, fiction.[1] In her practice, Portolese is interested in portraiture; in this work she illustrates the imagination as a psychological space in which anything is possible.[2]
[1] Marisa Portolese, Bloom, Another Day in Paradise, accessed December 2015, http://www.marisaportolese.com/art-work/bloom-another-day-in-paradise/.
[2] Ibid.