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Sirocco Studios is an independent platform and publisher dedicated to documenting artistic processes across disciplines, shaped through our encounters with individual artists and their projects.

12.04.26

Marina Grize on
Divine icons roam as lens

Sweetwater Gallery
March 5, 2026 through to April 18, 2026
Leipziger Straße 56-58, Berlin, Germany

I’ve read that the series originates from your time at the San Francisco Public Library during the summer of 2025. Can you describe your initial encounter with On Our Backs, and what drew you to return to it as the foundation for this body of work?

On Our Backs was still in publication when I was coming of age, though I can't recall exactly when I first encountered it. I've long collected feminist and queer periodicals, but lesbian ephemera is harder to find and access. About a decade ago I became seriously invested in learning more about a lesbian art history — photographers like Tee Corinne, JEB, Honey Lee Cottrell — and it was probably around then that I started seeking out issues of On Our Backs. What struck me about the magazine wasn't primarily its eroticism, though that's inseparable from what it is. It's that these women were making images of themselves under specific conditions.

I was living in San Francisco during the summer of 2025. I knew the library had a significant holding of the magazine, as it was originally published there. I was also reading the 25th anniversary edition of Valencia by Michelle Tea and walking the Mission nearly every day. There is a huge distance between my own accumulated experiences of San Francisco and the world Tea was articulating, and a political gap between her experiences of the city and the early days of On Our Backs. Yet, this was a stretching back through histories happening within my lifetime. These activities started to fold into each other, the physical act of looking for what remains in a neighborhood, the photocopying of the magazine.

I had just ended Bathers, a project I'd worked on for nearly five years. That project is photographs taken from cinematic fiction, from lesbian representation as it has been imagined, speculated, and constructed in film. The scenes haven't happened in the sense that they describe a world that doesn't fully exist—women existing only in relation to other women. The memory there is prospective. The inquiries that led to Divine Icons inverts this idea. Here, I am culling from something that did happen, women making themselves in their own image, exercising ownership over how they were seen, building a community through print culture and physical space. And yet that history is now almost illegible. It was never fully legible to begin with, and its disappearance is partly a function of having been treated as non-eventful. I’m interested in what that can look like, materially.


Obscuring imagery through a framework of physical manipulation, such as through photocopying, cropping and cast framing, Divine Icons Roam as Lens reimagines the archive of On Our Backs. Do you see process as inseparable from the final works, or something separate entirely?

The material processes are inseparable from what this work is, it is more of a response to a precarious history, to a memory. The printing and metal casting are methods of impression. These images have been through something, and the photocopy makes that visible. Every generation of copying introduces loss and a compounding obscurity. The photographs, made through contact printing, are records of contact with the surface. A process of reversal is to reveal a positive image. The cast frames work within the same logic…they're not representations of Valencia Street, they're records of contact with it. The fragmented image is given the treatment of a keepsake, a relic. You cannot hold the photograph without holding the impression of the street and you cannot read the street without the erotic fragment at its center.

I'm extracting from a collective form—the magazine, its grid, its editorial intent, even its community of readers. There's a bit of loss and melancholy in that. But the fragment, or dilation of a moment, has a different relationship to time and chance than the scroll or the feed, the archive or the institute, where you may encounter these images whole.

By intervening in archival imagery through such processes, the series seems to stretch what an image can hold, and what it can refuse. In a visual culture that often aligns the archive with legibility, what motivates you to pursue a kind of mysterious, elusive fiction.

I love this question. I’ll start by saying the archive is itself an incomplete construction, shaped just as much by what has been omitted or left out as by the materials it holds. There are a few artists that I admire who are doing the work of creating an almost ad-hoc archive, fully legible, through exposure, accumulation, and public address. But I identify with the idea stated, “to stretch what an image can hold, and what it can refuse;” an image can hold more time than it depicts and it can materially hold touch. Some photographs in this series are present but hidden, where no amount of looking can penetrate. So the hold and refuse aren’t oppositional.

The photographs as they appear in On Our Backs were never intended for all audiences. Obfuscation in the work is both a conceptual choice and a preservation of the original conditions of the magazine's circulation, its intimacy, its assumption of a particular reader. The two primary sources, On Our Backs and Valencia Street, are linked through place, time, and a shared project of lesbian sexual and cultural visibility, but, as mentioned earlier, neither is publicly apparent today. The title of the show Divine icons roam as lens is a near-anagram of Valencia in Mission Dolores. An anagram felt structurally true to the history I was working with. Terry Castle's concept of the "apparitional" lesbian describes a figure who has been made to not-quite-appear in Western cultural representation, present only as rumor, as shadow, as implication. The history is there but it requires a particular kind of attention to see.



Divine icons roam as lens is beautifully tactile, visceral and abstract. Where do you find the balance between narrative and emotion?

Thank you. The works carry narratives from specific dates, named publications, real women, particular streets, a documented community, a traceable history of censorship and gentrification. The title alone encodes a geography. At the same time, the narrative is structural to the end piece, perhaps in the way a photo negative is to the photograph, but I’m almost entirely withholding that from the visual surface of the work. I try to push the image away from representation towards a feeling. Can images feel like a memory? Not a specific memory with a beginning and end. I hope the result is that the works ask to be felt before they are read, and then, once you begin to read them, ask to be felt differently.

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