You Were Meant to See This: Professor Marisa Stratton
Are certain images destined to find us?
You Were Meant to See This by Prof. Marisa Stratton (b. location, year) explores the digital landscape of divination and fortune-telling through the world of TikTok livestream. Just as TikTok’s algorithms produce images in sequence, tarot readers offer viewers seemingly random images in a structured arrangement—an ancient recommendation engine placed within a contemporary one.
On TikTok, Tarot livestreamers speak to the viewer directly, rapidly moving through each stage of the reading—shuffling, selecting, and interpreting cards. Working from screenshots of the livestreams, Stratton repositions the readers into traditional tarot spreads (past/present/future, the cross of truth, celtic cross), placing them inside the structures they invoke. Painted in oil and drawn in pencil, the works reference and inhabit the illustrative world of tarot.
This exhibition questions how a modern viewer makes meaning in an infinite interface with no underlying narrative or structure. Are certain images destined to find us? Through these works, Stratton documents the growing desire for spirituality and abstraction in a digital culture that remains deeply rooted in materialism and representation.
Professor Marisa Stratton is a painter whose work explores contemporary portraiture in the context of screens. Stratton holds a BFA in Communication Arts with a minor in Painting + Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has participated in multiple group exhibitions including Delivery Systems (Joseph Gross Gallery, Tuscon, AZ) and Made in VA (Virginia MoCA, Virginia Beach, VA). Stratton has recently been featured in New American Paintings and Oxford-based publication, The String Mag.
Stratton teaches painting as an Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University.
