Robin Maaya’s "Exodus" - A Catharsis at Cedar House Gallery (2024)

Early last year, I introduced Connect readers to Robin Elise Maaya whom I described as “loquacious, vibrant, intelligent, sharp-as-a-whip, and deeply talented,” a young woman who “lives and breathes photography.” That column ended with mentioning she had a show almost ready to mount (“I have an addiction to getting my work out there!” she told me), and now, a year and a half and some serious health issues later, Exodus is finally ready to be revealed.

We recently met again in Maaya’s sundrenched, photography-filled Henry Street apartment to discuss Exodus, a project started during her prestigious post-graduate SCAD Ateliership. The Exodus self-portraits engage themes surrounding difficult childhood memories and the departure from childhood to womanhood.

But first, a quick overview of her prior shows is needed, as Exodusis very much a natural outgrowth of earlier work. Maaya graduated summa cum laude from SCAD in 2021 with a BFA in Photography (Fine Art & Documentary concentration). Her first stark black and white solo show, Girls Ward: Left from January of her sophom*ore year, dealt with childhood trauma and her teenage admission to a mental institution. The searingly honest work addresses difficult subjects others would feel too vulnerable or even ashamed about to discuss, but she says, “To be overly open is the way I deal with things.” The accompanying monograph containing her institutional forms and records sold out at the reception.

Then, in the fall of 2019, Maaya showed Moulting, which she calls “my coming-out story to my Mom. I’ve known I was gay since I was four, and I knew she had her suspicions, but I didn’t know how to tell her. So, I made a whole body of work even though there was never a question of whether she would accept me. It started out as a way to tell my mom, but really it was a way to process accepting myself.”

Next came her 2021 senior exhibition Home Away From Home consisting of a monograph, large-scale black and white photographs, photographic etchings, cyanotypes, encaustics, and a huge installation piece. A hauntingly beautiful collection of work, it surrounds her part-time employment as a respite-care nanny for the family of acclaimed Savannah photographer Christine (Chrissy) Hall. “I was at their house three days a week. Her twin daughter Ruby is non-verbal autistic with Cerebral Palsy, and I fell in love with her instantly. I would die for this child.”

When I met with Maaya last year and remarked on the similarities between the authenticity of Hall’s style and her own, Maaya told me, “Chrissy hired me to do some editing of her shoots and she’s definitely had a huge influence on my work, and we both are influenced by Sally Mann.” She refers to stellar American photographer Sally Mann (b.1951) whose iconic series Immediate Family, intimate black and white photographs of her children, first garnered her national recognition.

In addition to her senior exhibition, Maaya produced a senior showcase monograph of all her work with children: Little Children of the Sky of orphans in creches in South Africa; 10 sets of twins in Savannah; a portfolio called Boyhood of brothers in Savannah; and an ongoing, four-year series on identical twin girls Beni and Dani in Mississippi whose images are particularly striking.

Maaya explains her current show as “my way of processing traumas that happened when I was a kid that I didn’t really know about until I was a lot older. I remember being institutionalized in high school and dissecting memories with my therapist, dealing with my parents’ divorce, with body image issues, with OCD issues, with an abuse that happened when I was 11. But it wasn’t really until 2021 that I realized that things still lingered under the surface ..." She goes on, "Why was the Home Away from Home work sitting with me so heavily? I realized it was my inability to let go of childhood because it felt like my childhood had been taken from me.”

Maaya continues, “I started dissecting why I love photographing children. How in doing so it gives a piece of my childhood back to me.” The artist says she had a very loving childhood, only made unstable because of her parents' constant moves; she often felt the lack of a “place called home.” But on a deeper level, photographing kids was “a deeply emotional thing for me.” In 2021 she explored that emotion more thoroughly and began taking pictures “that went off a feeling, rather than trying to tell a story.” Through this process and through reading journals she kept as an adolescent, she slowly remembered and eventually uncovered the source of her childhood trauma. Something that happened not at age 11, but at age seven.

The daughter of a videographer and great granddaughter of a photography and videography professor who taught for 36 years at the University of Mississippi, Maaya has been taking images since the age of 14, inheriting and purchasing many cameras since then. She is most proud of the 4x5 large format, viewfinder camera she acquired from the widow of SCAD photography professor Tom Fischer. She tells me, “Every photo in this new show was taken with my 4x5 wooden field camera – the one where you go under the big cloak.”

At Cedar House, Maaya explores the transition from childhood to womanhood. One room represents childhood through a sculptural installation and imagery; an adjoining room contains images of womanhood; there are cyanotypes on fabric for an installation in the stairwell; and a “trippy, psychedelic” video installation projecting in her studio “that has lot of butterfly imagery to represent metamorphosis, transformation, and resurrection.” As usual, a printed monograph of her black and white photographs, journal entries, and writing will be available for purchase.

"There is a round room in a round house

with yellow walls, a grandfather clock,

and Precious Moments

figurines staring you down

wherever you go.

I remember white trim and

sandy carpet under my toes

in the house that built me,

the home that burned me.

They called me the “Vulnerable Child,”

a self-diagnosed burden.

I am now becoming a mirror

of my younger self.

My hair is still full of tangles and

reminiscent of the rats nest I built as a kid, and

I still chew my cheeks when I get nervous like I

did that night in Baton Rouge."

Robin Elise Maaya’s starkly beautiful show Exodus opens on Friday, June 14. at Cedar House Gallery, 122 E. 36thSt. The opening reception is from 6-9 p.m. with work displayed through a closing reception on July 5. Find Maaya at www.robinmaaya.com and follow her on Instagram @robinbirdy.