About
Madeleine Soloway is an interdisciplinary artist with a distinguished background in photography and printmaking, exploring human vulnerability in an ever-changing world. Her work delves into contemporary issues such as global instability, disinformation, and political upheaval. Through nuanced examinations of collective narratives, Soloway illuminates the complex interplay between humanity, the natural world, and the fragility of these relationships.
For over 18 years, Soloway has cultivated a hybrid approach that includes monoprinting, solvent transfers, collagraph, and digital processes. Her multi-layered, digitized monoprints and photographic images of houses, landscapes, and people explore profound human vulnerability amid a rapidly changing planet, raising questions about belonging, impermanence, and our impact on an uncertain future.
In her 'Gender, Dating, and Politics' series, Soloway scrutinizes the weaponization of language to sow discord and consolidate power. Incorporating direct quotations from speeches, news reports, and social media, superimposed over images of underwear, she highlights societal polarization and the actions dismantling democracy.
Soloway's work serves as a visual reflection on fragility across physical, emotional, and socio-political landscapes. Blurring boundaries between abstraction and lived reality, her art invites viewers to engage with contradictions and complexities inherent in our relationship with nature and each other. Ultimately, her work speaks to the interdependence, impermanence, and urgency of our shared world.
Originally from Boston, Madeleine Soloway has been an exhibiting artist in the Atlanta area for the past 35 years and was a former member of the art faculty at The Paideia School for 25 years. Soloway earned her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. With several solo exhibitions at the Jeremy Stone Gallery, San Francisco, in the 1980’s, Soloway’s work landed in many important private SF Bay Area collections and developed a strong following. More recently, Soloway regularly exhibits her multi-layered digitized monoprints and photographic prints in solo and group museum and gallery exhibitions throughout Georgia including a solo exhibition at Ponce City Market during Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a two-person exhibition at Reeves House Visual Arts Center and numerous juried group exhibitions including: Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Marietta Cobb Art Museum, Atlanta Photography Group Gallery, Swan Coach House, and Terminus Gallery.
More about the Gender, Dating and Politics series:
In my Gender, Dating, and Politics series, I confront the charged intersection where private desire collides with public discourse. At a moment when disinformation and political extremism increasingly infiltrate even our most intimate spaces, I turn to the overlooked yet potent symbol of underwear, an everyday garment loaded with connotations of privacy, vulnerability, and exposure. By layering direct quotations from political speeches, legacy media, and viral social media posts onto these intimate images, I reveal how language is weaponized to shape identity, inflame division, and erode our social fabric.
This body of work asks viewers to consider how dating, gender politics, and power structures interlace in our daily lives. Words that might seem harmless in isolation become charged when stripped of context and paired with the raw immediacy of the body. The resulting images blur the line between seduction and confrontation, forcing us to reckon with the ways in which the personal becomes political, and how the political seeps back into the personal.
At its essence, this series extends my ongoing exploration of fragility: physical, emotional, and socio-political. It invites viewers to question their own complicity in sustaining or challenging divisive narratives. By fusing abstraction with reality, the intimate with the starkly political, I aim to create a space where contradictions coexist: need and discomfort, revelation and concealment, connection and fracture. Through this work, I hope to spark dialogue about how we navigate a world in which our most personal choices and identities are increasingly entangled with, and vulnerable to, broader currents of disinformation, authoritarianism, and political / cultural upheaval.