Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano (born 1972) is an American visual artist working primarily in photography and video and a clinical psychoanalyst born in New York City.[1] She currently works in both New York and in Panama.[2] Mozman Solano's photographs and moving images simultaneously explore the relationship between storytelling, narrative fiction and documentary and the way that stories built on perception shape culture and condition behavior of individuals and environment.[2]
Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano is a first generation American and was born and grew up in New York City.[3] She works between New York City and Panama, her maternal family's country.[3] Her parents met at Hunter College at CUNY shortly after both immigrating to the U.S. and were committed to the Trotskyist movement for many years.[3] Her father was a Geologist who later became a Computer programmer and her mother worked for the New York City Department of Education.[3] Her paternal grandparents were sample maker's, and moved to New York City to work in the garment industry.[3]
Mozman Solano's artistic practice explores how mythology, history, the psyche, and economics overlap and become part of the psychological and somatic experience. Mozman Solano's work addresses trauma as a consequence of racial supremacism, diaspora and subjugation, particularly in the experience of women. Her photographs and videos address narrative, and the exploration of narrative as shaped by perception.[6]
Her 2018 project Metamorphosis of Failure was inspired by a 2014 MoMA exhibition of the works of Paul Gauguin. Mozman Solano explored Gauguin's interest in racial purity against his biracial background, as well as the role of the museum in shaping cultural perceptions of him.[7] This project also engages with a feminist critique by creating images of Gauguin's muses and their poses.[8][9][3]
In 2020 Mozman Solano released her monograph Colonial Echo with Kris Graves Projects,[10] bringing together two related bodies of work, Casa de Mujeres and La Negra. The work draws upon her family biography and interviews. In Casa de Mujeres she addresses the experience colonialism in Panama and its impact. In La Negra she explores her family's migration to the American south, and later to New York City.[11] The name for the title La Negra, comes from the nickname given to her grandmother by her family.[12]
Mozman Solano has held residencies at institutions including The Camera Club of New York, Light Work, LMCC workspace, and Smack Mellon, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship.[2] Mozman Solano's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artnexus, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal.[2] Her work has been published in Aperture Magazine, Exit magazine, Contact Sheet: The Light Work Annual, Presumed Innocence, Vogue Italia, and numerous other publications.[2]