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INSTALLATIONS
stealth project
- 2007
From the eye of a smart bomb to fragments left on the pavement, the
'Stealth Project' provokes new ways of seeing and understanding the
shifting and unstable geographies of our current moment. Blurring the
boundaries of nature and culture, landscapes are the production of human
actions, desires, and needs. Their 'reality' can be deceptive, landscapes
conceal as much as they reveal, and what may be 'common' is that which
we cannot see. "Stealth Project" addresses a series of questions:
what is our relationship to the complex and contested geographies of
our moment in the global community? How does technology frame our understanding
and experience, as we witness the ruptures and inscription of events
along the borders and across the surface of these contested geographies?
Formally, "Stealth
Project" is not media specific, the installation contains groupings
of digital prints and photographs, which function as maps and related
documentary materials. Magnified fragments, targeted images isolated
in fields of whiteness, test strips sliced from photographs of unidentified
shadows; all reference a landscape, scrutinized and filtered by technology.
Discarded across the expanse of the installation, small bundles of camouflage
bound in wire, scatter and accumulate. Seams of camouflage clothing,
stripped to linear slivers, are pinned to the walls mapping an immediate
geography of trauma and experience.
beautiful youth
- 1999 / 2004
Beautiful Youth points toward the construction of the female within
twentieth century experience. Bringing together propaganda photographs
from the Third Reich, wax castings, and uniforms for women workers,
the installation creates a tension between the fascist model of the
ideal female, and our own familiarity and acceptance of these models
within contemporary culture. Photographic images of women harvesting
grain, holding ducklings, feeding babies, setting tables, etc. are appropriated
from the Nazi book, "Women At Work" by Hans Retzlaff. Re-contextualized,
recomposed, and re-framed in large rusted steel frames, these images
of "women's work" reveal not only how the Nazi ideal of womanhood
is constructed but how our own images of female identity are produced.
"On one of
two large work tables are fragments of hands, sections of arms, and
fingers. Objectified and ready for use, these 'parts' are cast in wax.
Rothenberg signals the use of the body a site for production - industrial,
economic, physical, and psychological. The complementary table, with
large glassine fingerprint drawings, respond to this production with
the traces of human presence, and of individual identity. The workers'
aprons hanging in the installation similarly compress both historical
and contemporary identity, and speak of absences and presences, both
spectral and real that inhabit our lives."
Jeffrey Skoller,
New Art Examiner , June 2000
"When we see,
touch and walk amid these fragments, what is it exactly that we remember?
The events from which these objects have been torn? Our experiences
as memory tourists at the museum?... For Rothenberg, it is the imaginative
leap we always make in memory that constitutes the act and art of remembrance."
James Young,
"After Images," exhibition catalogue, 2004
anne frank project
- 1991 / 2001
The
Anne Frank Project is not a documentary about a young Jewish girl whose
two years in hiding in Nazi occupied Amsterdam ended with her death
in Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1944. Its subject is not the
facts of history, whatever they may be. But its successive representations
and permutations as Rothenberg first experienced them through reading
the Critical Edition of the diary. It is history viewed through the
lens of the Anne Frank story, as it was recuperated and rewriiten, reinvented
and transformed.
It is history understood
as systems of knowledge and information rather than events. And it is
Rothenberg's insertion of herself - female, Jewish, vanguard artist
- into a history which effectively silenced the voices of Jewish women
and modern artists.
Whitney Chadwick
from "The Conditions for Growth" 1994
"Ellen Rothenberg
tackles material that many other artists might find too loaded or problematic
to bring into the realm of art. Recent revelations concerning the authenticity,
censorship, and editorial manipulations of the Diaries of Anne Frank
become the means whereby Rothenberg explores ways that history is written,
that the individual subject is constituted and that the public and private
intersect."
Lynne Cooke,
David Ross, Elisabeth Sussman, Matthew Teitelbaum
BOSTON NOW /10, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1991
marginal way
- 1990
From:
"Installation and Place," Boston Center for the Arts
THE MARGINAL WAY" suggests a multi-level landscape within an architectural
space. Moving through this architectural landscape, the viewer encounters
a series of " markers". The subtext of these markers reflects
on questions of personal location and the possibility of physical and
political movement. As a grouping strategically sited within the architecture
of the exhibition, these markers become the viewers' landmarks and mapping
points.
for the instruction
of young ladies - 1989
from the exhibition "Allusion/Dimension," Rose Art Museum
"For the instruction of young ladies" examined the education
of women as a method of socialization rather than as a means of acquiring
knowledge. In the installation the vocabulary of educational tools:
samplers, slates, books, and pencils spoke to the on-going agenda for
women's roles in America.
measuring with
eyes and feet - 1991
From the exhibition "CENTER MARGINS" Howard Yezerski Gallery
"MEASURING WITH THE EYES AND FEET" articulated the marginalization
of women within architectural space. By placing objects and text at
ceiling height, around corners, and along the baseboards, the installation
forced the viewer into a physical experience of this isolation and marginality".
text from installation:
AN ENTERPRISE OF EARTH AND WOOD
COOKING WITHOUT BENDING DOWN
DWELLING UNDERNEATH THE BED
ALONG THE CRACK WHERE DIRT COLLECTS
WE WILL DIE OF HYGIENE
THE HARD LAWS OF MODERN MACHINERY
EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE
ALL CORNERS WILL BE ROUNDED
YARDLESS, CELLARLESS, STAIRLESS, KITCHENLESS
CAPTAIN OF THE DOMESTIC SHIP
DEMARKING THE THRESHHOLD OF THE PRIVATE
THE NOTION OF SERVICE
THE GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION OF SEXUALITY
AN INQUIRY INTO THE DUTIES
speak! - 1989
Massachusetts College of Art
"It is the quality of transformation, and with it a simultaneous
sense of potential energy, that makes these objects so compelling...They
all point in the direction of action, and it is through action that
they undergo transformation... Language is very much at issue here.
Rothenberg questions just what it is we agree to call things, what constitutes
a standard, and in doing so asks whether things change once they are
named..."
Daniel Eisenberg
from the exhibition publication
reproductions
- 1989 installation of four works
The Museum of Fine Arts / Boston
"Rothenberg's clothes become embodiments of ideas; her clothes
do not hide or cover, they stress what may not be obvious. Just as we
choose what to wear, we are responsible for our thoughts and deeds.
Her clothes and hats and shoes confront viewers, asking them to form
opinions about fundamental moral and political dilemmas. For instance,
the army surplus hat shouts "YOU," challenging the viewer
to become either an actor or observer.
...Ellen Rothenberg's
recent INFIDELITY APRON dissects in order to recombine the meanings
and patterns of language. In her hands, the printed word is a malleable
image and material. ...Clearly, any image, language, or form resists
final interpretation, and as representations of even the most recent
history are reproduced and consequently remade, new expression is born."
curators: Kathy
Halbreich and Trevor Fairbrother
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