Dominik Tarabański’s latest work is currently on view in New York's Ross + Kramer in Claudine’s House, a group exhibition inspired by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s 1922 novel.
His photographic series Roses for My Mother, installed across the gallery’s Eastern wall, anchors the show with its fragile yet forceful presence—botanical characters suspended, clipped, and contorted into complex compositions that balance tenderness with tension.
Roses for My Mother began in 2018 as a series of personal postcards sent to his mother while traveling—an optimistic gesture of gratitude for her patience, trust, and love. Over time, these fleeting images grew into a sustained language. “From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the interplay between the organic and the synthetic,” Dominik reflects. “Even in film school, I was drawn to exploring how those two realms could intersect and what kind of creative tension that could create.”
That tension now plays out in the details: blossoms stretched and bound by metal clips, rubber bands, gaffer tape, or fruit nets, their fragility supported by improvised scaffolding from everyday life. Each arrangement resists idealized bloom, instead embracing sagging stems, bowed petals, and the visible traces of process. Like Colette’s refusal to offer tidy portraits of domestic life, Dominik allows imperfection to speak as truth.
A pivotal moment arrived in 2021, when curator Karen Wong recognized the broader potential of the work. With her encouragement, Dominik began to see Roses for My Mother not just as a single project but as a language capable of carrying forward and expanding.
As the project developed, so too did its physical presence. Originally conceived as a tribute to his mother, the work later expanded in response to his father’s serious illness—a profound shift that demanded larger forms. “If the emotional scale of what I wanted to express had grown,” Dominik explains, “then the physical scale of the work should grow as well. It became that simple.”
This exploration of magnitude was introduced in Little Roses, created in Oaxaca and exhibited with Ross + Kramer earlier this year—a teaser for a new solo body of work planned for next year. For Dominik, working with scale is both technical and existential, raising questions about human vulnerability in the face of forces larger than ourselves.
Through these gestures—delicate, labor-intensive, fleeting—Dominik continues to expand Roses for My Mother into a vocabulary of love, memory, and transformation. What began as postcards for his mother has become a living, growing body of work that mirrors the fragile cycles of life itself.
