A scene that has yet to happen: Marina Grize’s Bathers

A woman wades into the ocean. A woman runs along the shore. Women float on the light-dappled surface of a lake, alone and together. Lingering in the bathtub, a woman is obscured by cigarette smoke. Another covers her face in the shower. Two women embrace in a kiss, waist-deep in water. A woman is caught in the pouring rain.

Marina Grize’s Bathers series conjures a cinematic universe—obviously speculative—in which women exist not in relation to men, but only in relation to other women. In these many images of women, alone, or coupled, or occasionally in groups, Grize doesn't represent the lesbian image so much as lesbian desire, diffused throughout each scene and carried in the multi-sensory space of water. Bodies of water—oceans, lakes, swimming pools—are evoked as places of discovery and longing. The association between women and water runs deep in art, literature, and film, far beyond the trope of the bather invoked in Grize’s series title. Here, however, swimming out to sea is no omen of death; no punishment awaits these protagonists.

Grize sources the aquatic images that comprise the Bathers from varied works of twentieth and twenty-first century lesbian cinema, which she captures on expired Polaroid film. Freezing the flow of moving images on a screen, Grize creates a film still that she re-photographs, producing an analog copy. Unlike traditional darkroom photography, which entails submerging light-sensitive paper in chemical baths, Polaroids catalyze their chemical processes internally and are, so to speak, self-bathing. The unstable dye-diffusion film produces washes and striations of translucent color, creating atmospheric images that often strain legibility. Giving filmic stills this analog embodiment, Grize then encases the print in a mixed-metal frame of the kind that outlines stained glass windows. Hand-soldered by the artist, its seams bear physical traces of its making, composed of substances that liquify and transform through heat. Grize expands the language of appropriation, copying images and subjecting them to time and chance—to the unpredictability of degraded film—and to touch.

Both mechanically reproduced and handcrafted, the Bathers appear as artifacts from the future. “To remember a scene that has yet to happen” is one way Sara Ahmed describes lesbian feminism1, also offering an apt description of Grize’s photographs. The Bathers are copies once removed from their “original” filmic referent. And what is the original referent? Lesbian representation in film is famously paradoxical, caught between an apparitional invisibility and an exploitable hypervisibility.2 Grize often selects moments in which women turn away or cover their faces, and her photographic processes further anonymize them; the dye-diffusion film produces effects that read as double exposures or shadows of underexposure. In this way, she depicts as well as protects her subjects from the hypersexualization long directed at lesbian sexuality.

By titling her series Bathers, Grize invokes one of art history’s most enduring motifs, one that distills the Western pictorial project of displaying women’s bodies for men’s consumption. For some viewers, the bather motif may conjure Impressionist scenes of voluptuous outdoor odalisques, or Renoir’s “beached, blubbery whale-women” as Linda Nochlin described the painter’s “antifeminist icons.”3 Yet, Nochlin observed, such paintings also reflected the rising popularity of public bathing as a leisure activity in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century France. As she acknowledges, for women viewers, the fleshy bathers, laughing and splashing—released from their corsets—may have offered fantasies of bodily freedom. Like postcards from the future, Grize’s lesbian bathers similarly invite fantasies of bodily liberation, offering sensuality without spectacle.

The Bathers project began in 2020, early in the pandemic, when Grize was living in San Diego, a border city on the beach that has no shortage of year-round bathers. She continued the series after moving to Philadelphia, which happens to be home to one of the largest and most important paintings in the long tradition of bathers. Celebrated as a masterpiece of composition and color, Cézanne’s Large Bathers (1900–1906) has also prompted silent head-scratching on the part of critics and audiences perplexed by the painting’s seemingly unfinished state and the ambiguity of the bathers’ anatomy. Not merely an idyllic scene, Cézanne’s androgynous figures merge and overlap, collapsing background and foreground and the very signs of sexual difference. As argued by T.J. Clark, the Large Bathers—worked and reworked over many years—generates sexual and psychological undercurrents, enacting modernism’s unconscious wishes.4

Grize inherits something from the Large Bathers, especially in its dispersal of the single, unified viewpoint that centers the male gaze. Smeared and watermarked, her Bathers reveal and obscure, representing erotic experience by way of reflections and ripples. Grize often crops her stills tightly to produce close-ups that heighten intimacy and affect while rendering the degraded Polaroids harder to parse. These scenes of swimming and bathing—refracted and reflected—convey a desire that is felt and negotiated without being clarified or resolved. Grize affirms lesbian visibility even as she interrogates it. If a lesbian iconography comparable to that of gay male iconography—concretized in figures like Saint Sebastian and Tom of Finland—remains elusive, Grize proposes an iconography of traces and gestures. Understanding her images to be already compromised, the artist assembles an archive of “bathers” and invites us to see them anew. She asks us to see what was never fully seen in the first place—indeed, she asks us to remember scenes that have yet to happen.

Originally published in Marina Grize: a screen, a mirror, a window, Hassla Books, 2025.