©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act I – Failure of Purpose

I first came across Mara Magyarosi-Laytner’s work on instagram a number of years ago through an exhibition with the Society of Photographic Education. Her work from “The Untended Garden” strikes a balance I’m always looking for with aesthetics and concepts. As a woman recently part of the thirty-plus club, the struggle between what is expected of you and your true nature is a difficult one to decipher. Mara’s images get to the core of this struggle, using iconography of mother nature in the delicate flowers balanced with the reality of space and figures in life. The images are painterly in nature, but as viewers spend time with the work they will feel something much deeper, akin to the sublime.

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act III – Echo

Mara Magyarosi-Laytner is an artist who pairs multiple experimental lens based methods to explore identity through a symbolic and poetic viewpoint. A graduate of both College for Creative Studies and Savannah College of Art and Design, she is an artist, educator, and curator in the Detroit area. The artist and her work have been featured internationally, including in exhibitions and festivals in the United States, Canada, Italy, France, and Hungary. Mara’s artistic and curatorial projects have been featured in multiple articles and periodicals, including Complex, Float Magazine, Detroit Metro Times, The Hand Magazine, and Aeonian Magazine. In 2022, her work from The Untended Garden was a Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist. To support the efforts of innovative and experimental lens based artists, Mara cofounded and is the co-executive director of NOVA24, an international photography + film festival located in Detroit, Michigan.

Follow Mara on Instagram: @maramagyarosi and @nova.twentyfour

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act III – Adorn

The Untended Garden

they convinced me
i only had a few good years left
before i was replaced by a girl younger than me
as though men yield power with age
but women grow into irrelevance
they can keep their lies
for i have just gotten started

An Excerpt from timeless by Rupi Kaur

Throughout history, women have been held up to the exacting standards of society. These standards, taught to us as young girls and reinforced in a multitude of ways, affect the views that women hold of themselves as they age. From the start of my thirties, I’ve spent so much time questioning who I am and why I see myself in that way. I’ve been told throughout my entire life that there was a certain set of “perfections” I had to uphold to be an ideal woman. Many of those ideas clash with my own, and this fracture of thought is where this exploration began.

The Untended Garden is a visual reflection structured in three acts – the expectations of women as informed by society and culture, the transformation that women reach as they break through during their coming of age, and the resolution of self that comes from the acceptance of flaws and the reality of aging. By combining still life and self-portrait photographs with experimental photographic alcohol transfer methods, this project explores multiple facets of the cyclical nature of life in a garden as a metaphor to reflect on my experience as a woman. At the heart of this work, The Untended Garden is about the universality of transforming identity and gaining the wisdom to see flaws as strengths.

You can get a copy of The Untended Garden from Starling Common Press here.

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act I – To Pluck

Epiphany Knedler: How did your project come about?

Mara Magyarosi-Laytner: The Untended Garden came about from a very strange time in my life. We were in the middle of the pandemic, already an insane situation, but I was also making a lot of life changes that I didn’t expect to make. I started my MFA, changed my job, and noticed that without realizing it, the person I looked at in the mirror greatly shifted. In a weird way, it felt like I went to sleep in my early twenties and woke up, wide awake, in my thirties.

One day, I was watching a SPE Online talk with Nick Shepard and he said, “Untended gardens gather dust.” I had a completely visceral reaction – Is that what I was? Did I become untended over time? As usual, once I have a question, I can’t stop. I started twisting this inquiry from every angle that I could.

After developing a large portion of the work during my thesis, I expanded the work in the year after graduation and designed The Untended Garden book myself as a companion art piece to the series.

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act III – Temple

EK: Is there a specific image that is your favorite or particularly meaningful to this series?

MML: It’s really hard to narrow it down to one – I’m going to cheat a bit and pick two.

Act I – Failure of Purpose: It’s incredible to realize the sheer amount of artwork and literature about women that surround motherhood. For those of us who have chosen not to, or unable to, have children, the subject can be a daunting thing to dodge. For myself, there’s an additional layer because I choose to teach – the amount of times that I get hit with, “But, you’re so good with kids!” is unbelievable. With everything that is shifting, minute by minute, in women’s health, all I could think about was despite everything that I have accomplished
in my life – love, loss, chasing dreams, living as large as I could – to some, I will be considered a failure for not giving birth to a child of my own. Once a month, nature makes sure I remember society’s expectations.

Act III – Temple: To me, Act III was the hardest group of images to tackle, but ultimately, the most rewarding. Back at the mirror, I was noticing all sorts of differences in myself – gray hair, wrinkles, scars, weight, and more. Rather than wallow in it (which trust me, I wanted to!), I decided to explore myself as new ground. I chose to photograph all of the parts of me that bothered me in the most beautiful way that I could. Ultimately that led me down the path of image transfers – I needed them to feel removed from my opinions, transformed into something even I couldn’t deny.

At first, I just had images of flowers sitting next to the images, but it didn’t feel like enough. The turning point for the entire project was the night that I set flowers on top of the image transfer in the studio. Temple, where I’m noticing the gray hair streaks that once were few, was the first image that grappled with the push and pull of wanting to protect myself through veiling while revealing my true self right now.

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act II – A Fracture of Being

EK: Can you tell us about your artistic practice?

MML: The work that I create is pulled from a deep internal desire to be understood by the people that surround me. I often find that I have large questions about where I stand in the world and it’s through the creation of visual work that I find common ground to communicate with. As an anxious introvert that often is performing socially to further my goals, my artistic work takes that energy and converts it into something with more nerve that I ever imagined I would have.

Although I have an academic background in photography, my interests expand into film, design, installation, fashion, and performance. My interdisciplinary outlook has resulted in a complete lack of patience for rules when it comes to photography – I enjoy experimenting in my studio to find ways to break them. My primary photographic influences are Cig Harvey, Bea Nettles, and Uta Barth – a group of women artists who also are unapologetic towards expectations.

As a primarily digital artist with a background in traditional and alternative darkroom techniques, my editing methods mix together historical and modern references to bring the work to a new, multi-layered space. Once the work moves out of the digital realm, I’m thinking spatially and in terms of larger scale installations, often with experimental printing processes.

My favorite space to live in my studio is in dealing with materiality, and I usually can be found trying new ways to make prints less digital in nature. For example, Act I and III of The Untended Garden utilize alcohol based image transfers using hand sanitizer! That’s actually why you can see the brush strokes in the images – the hand sanitizer holds the form of the brush until you touch it with your hands.

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act II – Age of Inevitability

EK: What’s next for you?

MML: I’m actually ecstatic that I’m developing new work for two different projects. (For a hot minute, I was very afraid that I might end up being a one trick pony, haha.)

The Distant Swell of the Open Ocean is a body of work I started developing after the death of my father’s three older siblings, affectionately referred to as The First Litter. I’ve been handed the keys to the archival kingdom with so many little baggies of pictures, so I’m exploring and reimagining the work as a conversation between myself and them.

The Subtle Body of Living Things began last year when I realized that I spend most of my time chasing, or being adjacent to, peace, but never close enough to actually experience it. This work is playing with photography in conjunction with filmmaking and installation – it’s pushing the boundaries of what I know how to do quite a bit, so it’s a little unnerving, but incredibly exciting for me.

Outside of the boundaries of my own work, I’ve been working hard on NOVA24 | Photo + Film Festival, an international month-long celebration co-founded by myself and Raymar, an incredible photographer and filmmaker in Detroit. Each July, we curated a program of 30+ events with a focus of innovation and experimentation at multiple locations throughout the metro Detroit area. In the coming years, we’re hoping to expand to create even more opportunities for lens based artists to visit and connect in Detroit. The Project Open Call opens each March for anyone who is interested in being a part!

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, The Untended Garden

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act I – To Primp + To Cut

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act II – The Climb

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act III – Scars + Flutter

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Questions for Mom

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act I – The Coming of Age

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act II – Contrast of Nature

©Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Act III – Gaze + Gray

Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the ways we engage with history. She graduated from the University of South Dakota with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science and completed her MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. She is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serving as an Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of the Art Department at Northern State University, a Content Editor with LENSCRATCH, and the co-founder and curator of the art collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited in the New York Times, the Guardian, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded through Lensculture, the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.
Follow Epiphany on Instagram: @epiphanysk