Secondhand. Censored. Estheticized.
Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz
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(...) It is only in my interior landscape that time is compressed and victims of current events become interchangeable with those from earlier wars. In this landscape violence seems timeless, changeless and everywhere equally horrible. It is from within this landscape that I make my protest. Violence seems ubiquitous—Iraq, Madrid, London, Russia, Israel, Palestine—and as it fills the world, so does it fill my consciousness. During the summer of 2005, I sought images that elicited a generalized sense of empathy in me. It was important to me that the quality of violence superseded the specifics of politics and geography. The first drawings I did were inspired from daily photographs in the New York Times, then I began to hunt out war imagery wherever I could find it. Finally, I posed my own models in the studio and worked from that imagery. (...) ELAINE SPATZ-RABINOWITZ is an Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. Previously she taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Phillips Academy and Rhode Island School of Design. In 2000 she was a resident artist at UCross Foundation in Wyoming and The Painting Space in New York. Her work has been exhibited at Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Harris Gallery in New York, DeCordova Museum, Davis Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 2004 she was the featured cover artist in Publication of the Modern Language Association, and between 2003 and 2005 she was a member of Public Art Commission of the Cambridge Arts Council. Spatz-Rabinowitz holds an M.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a B.A. from Antioch College. |
