Colleen Murray Otcasek’s practice engages the intersection of constructed image, materiality, and performance. Informed by a formative upbringing on film sets—her father the acclaimed actor Don Murray, her mother Bettie Johnson, a top fashion model—Colleen’s work reflects a lifelong negotiation between cinematic narrative and visual stylization.

Having spent years working internationally as a fashion model across cultural hubs including Paris, Milan, Germany, Spain, and New York City, Colleen developed a nuanced understanding of gesture, surface, and light. These early experiences—particularly in front of the camera—now inform her conceptual and material investigations behind it.

Her current body of work, which she often describes as Prop Art, involves the meticulous staging of hand-manipulated assemblages, which she photographs using theatrical lighting setups reminiscent of 1980s fashion studios. Drawing on the legacy of tungsten mono lighting, she explores how shadow operates not merely as absence, but as an active agent—sculpting form, implying volume, and interrogating the surface image.

“My fascination with light and shadow began by watching how photographers used strong, focused lights to shape a scene,” she says. “The shadows they created weren’t just technical—they added drama, depth, and a sense of mystery to the image.”

Otcasek employs the photographic frame as a proscenium, constructing temporal tableaux that hover between documentation and illusion, intimacy and artifice. The resulting images evoke both the immediacy of performance and the permanence of objecthood.

She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.