Rolls & Tubes Collective is comprised of four women photographers from California: Christy McDonald, Colleen Mullins, Jenny Sampson, and Nicole White. The commodification of the commonplace became a running theme of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Having made homebodies of us all, COVID-19 created absurd rolling shortages of flour, hair dye, and of course, toilet paper. This was the genesis of the ongoing work by the Rolls & Tubes Collective. In this work, each of the four artists reinterpreted a known image from the photographic canon utilizing toilet paper as a compositional element.
“Over the course of a year that demanded we think more critically about inclusion, the project became something far greater than the sum of its parts: a series of four individual artists’ interpretations of great works from the history of photography posted on Instagram merged into a collective reflection on the writing of that history itself. In selecting which works to re-create, share, and include in the final edit, the four artists made deliberate decisions to celebrate some of the best-known photographers’ work while also purposefully addressing the omissions in traditional narratives. Through close looking, meticulous work, critical reflection, and – most essentially – humor, the members of Rolls and Tubes managed to transform toilet paper into a creative lifeline for themselves and an utterly unexpected and generous lens onto the power of photographic images for the rest of us.” - excerpt from Corey Keller’s book essay On a Roll: Unspooling the History of Photography