Rosemary
Symbiosis

Photographer Anastasia Vorobyova, working under the alias Rosemary, encountered the world of new technology and embraced it. Nowadays, she identifies not as an art/fashion/designer/photographer (underline as applicable), but rather as a new-breed all-round creator. In Resemary’s oeuvre, humans seem to belong to an altogether different species: all models are covered in slime, as if they have just come into being. The images comprise anything from self-portraits and real-life photo shoots to AI models – essentially symbiotic creatures generated in collaboration with the computer.

Back in its days, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus appeared as a kind of Renaissance manifesto reflecting the period’s concepts of humanity. In an attempt to create a visual representation of ethereal physicality sought after by his contemporaries, the artist famously tweaked the proportions of the female body, slightly elongating the neck and lowering the shoulders. Botticelli’s Venus emerged in this world with a melancholy look and a bashful pose imitating classical statues. The new digital aesthetics calls forth new ideals of femininity Rosemary very carefully guides her creatures into being by immersing them in vegetative-like states. These symbiotes and moss-covered maidens are clearly as yet unprepared to enter this world. Perhaps they are experiencing something akin to what Gregor Samsa felt waking up as an insect. Still, a sensation running through Rosemary’s art is that of self-contained calm, achieved by overcoming the existential dread.