Poppies (Navy)

Marina Ross' paintings draw from the enduring imagery of The Wizard of Oz, using its familiar visual language as a framework to explore memory, longing, and the emotional resonance of cultural myth. Rather than referencing the film as narrative, Ross approaches it as a shared archive of collective experience—one that has evolved over generations and continues to shape ideas of home, fantasy, and belonging. Through this lens, familiar symbols become vessels for examining absence, nostalgia, and the ways images carry meaning beyond their original context.

Working from film stills, archival imagery, and constructed landscapes, Ross blurs the boundaries between reality and artifice. Figures dissolve into richly patterned surfaces, while imagined landscapes reveal themselves as carefully fabricated environments, collapsing distinctions between the authentic and the theatrical. Her paintings invite viewers to consider how constructed images can evoke deeply genuine emotional experiences.

Rooted in both personal history and broader cultural memory, Ross' practice examines the capacity of familiar iconography to hold complex emotional narratives. By reimagining one of the most enduring symbols in American popular culture, her work transforms nostalgia into a space for reflection, exploring the intersections of grief, beauty, memory, and the enduring search for belonging.