Mari Calai Joins the Brâncuși Exhibit at Alliance Française in Washington DC

Platinum, palladium, cyanotype and a darkroom in Northern Virginia. On November 13, her prints hang in the room with Brâncuși.

Mari Calai will show work at the Brâncuși exhibit at Alliance Française de Washington on November 13. She is the newest artist to join Ce Fain!, and this is where we begin.

Mari is an American artist of Romanian origin. She has lived in Romania, Italy and South Korea, and now works from Northern Virginia. Her medium is photography, pushed well past the camera. She prints in platinum palladium, cyanotype and lith. She makes photograms, silver gelatin prints and her own handmade papers. She draws and paints when the photograph runs out of things to say.

A darkroom is a small room

Mari describes time in the darkroom as meditative. The process asks for it. A platinum palladium print is coated by hand, exposed under UV, and developed in chemistry that does not forgive hurry. A cyanotype turns paper deep blue in sunlight and rinses out in plain water. A photogram needs no camera at all, only an object, a sheet, and light.

Her subject, across all of it, is impermanence. Two Japanese ideas run through the work: mono no aware, the low ache of things passing, and wabi-sabi, the beauty of what is worn, uneven, unfinished. They fit a life lived across several countries. Her own words, from her current show at Glen Echo Photoworks: "Each of my works tell a story as I approach my craft with a life-long learning lens."

The pieces are quiet. They ask you to stand closer.

What she brings to a Brâncuși room

Brâncuși was born in 1876, in Hobița, in Gorj County. This year marks 150 years since. He spent his working life in Paris, in a studio he treated as a single composition, with plinths, tools and finished sculptures arranged as one continuous work.

He also kept a darkroom there. Brâncuși photographed his own sculptures, with light doing half the sculpting. He knew that a polished bronze changes with every hour, and that a photograph could hold one hour of it still.

Mari works from the same instinct. Her prints are about surface and light, and about a form reduced until only the essential shape remains. A sacred geometry drawn from nature. Heirloom doilies made by her mother, worked into the pictures as symbols. Kintsugi, the Japanese repair of broken ceramic in gold, shapes her current work. The crack is part of the object's history and stays visible.

Put those prints in a room with Brâncuși and the conversation is easy to hear. Both of them edit toward the essential. Both trust light.

The work you can see on the 13th

Mari's exhibition at Alliance Française on November 13 draws from her existing body of work, chosen for this room. 

Her most recent book, DOR, was curated by Lynn Radeka and reviewed by Sylvia Plachy. Dor is the Romanian word for a longing with no exact English equivalent. Her two books were published in Seoul and Washington DC, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Mary Riley Styles Public Library in Falls Church, Virginia, and at Gallery Conceal in Shibuya, Tokyo. 

She trained at the New York Institute of Photography, graduating in 2012, and now teaches workshops in the processes she shows.

Where and when

Brâncuși exhibit, featuring Mari Calai Friday, November 13 Alliance Française de Washington, 2142 Wyoming Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008

Alliance Française is a confirmed partner of Ce Fain! in our 2026 program, Form & Flight, which is built around Brâncuși's 150th anniversary. Mari's evening is part of that year. 

Mari on Ce Fain!

Ce Fain! is a curated marketplace for independent Romanian designers and makers with a Romanian connection, based in Washington DC. Mari's prints are on the site under her name. Each piece comes with the process, the paper and the edition, because with alternative photographic prints those details are the work.

Come to the 13th. Stand close to a platinum print. Then look at the sculpture in the next room.

See Mari Calai's work at Ce Fain! 

Ce fain.