The Certain Journey: Meditations On Lives Passing

Show of work at the Brickbottom Artists Gallery, January through February, 2005

The Certain Journey refers to the universal human passage towards death. In this show, five artists express through their work their experiences with their dying or deceased parents. Read: Review in the Boston Globe Living Arts Section, January 6, 2005 My installation was concerned with using a fraction of the materials and documents that I could not throw away after they died. What to do with all the stuff? I turned some of it into my artwork, saved, temporarily, from the jaws of the trash compactor.

Brief Description of Artwork
Title: Curtains
Mixed Media Installation, 2005
Brickbottom Artists Gallery Show titled: The Certain Journey: Meditations On Lives Passing

Key to Installation

Part I

8ft. x 8ft., Window

Lace Curtains from my parent's living room surrounding a window frame with transparent, acetate sheet 'windows' printed with stories about my parents' experiences during the Holocaust in Poland. Recreating the view through the windows of their home in Rego Park, New York, and a look into a tragic part of their history.

Part II

Four 6ft. x 8in. canvas panels surrounding a central 6ft. x 6ft panel.

Left panel: Poland, Where We Came From - Polish earth, Polish stamps my parents saved

Right panel: Queens, New York, The Goldena Medina - Queens earth, gold leaf paint

Lower panel: Hell - Images from the Holocaust

Top panel: Heaven - Negatives of deceased relatives

Center panel: Collaged documents, letters, patterns, buttons, that my parents saved, words that my parents spoke or wrote with an 8 in. plexiglass panel on top containing negative print photographs of my family.

Part III

Dinner with My Mother, Artists Book

Black cotton handmade paper/pulp painting, 2002

This book was created after my mother told me some of her experiences of starvation during the Holocaust. The black whole with teeth describes the mouth, the empty bowl, different views, but still blackness, bleak, empty bowl, mouth, silence, hunger, her life, chewed up by hate, nothingness left.

Consulting Installation Artist: Mario Kon

Installation Title: Nazis Planted a Forest To Hide The Mass Graves

Location: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Gallery

   
Sprayed Handmade Paper Pulp Sheets, acrylic rods, mono filament, 18ft. x 18ft.,1998