Afterimage is a series of abstract portraits of people. Instead of depicting faces and scenery, the expressionist style, the marks, and the colors denote the sense of the person or important events. The idea behind this work was to give form to meaningful but nonverbal experiences and characterize individuals by the physical process of making the artwork as an act of reflection.
Hopkins Center for the Arts
March 22-April 22, 2018
Artist Talk, April 12, 2018
2016, mixed media, oil paint, on canvas. various sizes from ten inches across to three feet across
The Foreigner! 2016
Websters Dictionary entry: foreigner, alien, non-native, stranger, outsider, immigrant, landed immigrant, refugee, settler, newcomer. ANTONYMS native. WORD xenophobia. With Foreigner! I explore and correlate contemporary and historical xenophobia with migration stories. The work involves research, photography, and employing mechanisms of abstraction. The material result includes pictures and didactic essays. For each piece to come alive, I hope readers will interact with the artwork. I, therefore, show or share as publicly as possible to expose the work- for example, hanging the work outside the cafeteria. The accompanying essays supply topical information to inspire viewer reaction. Working through the intimacy of family history punctuates the contemporaneity. It personalizes the plight characterizing today’s stake in local and international political violence fueled by racist discourses and waves of social amnesia. I work within a framework of actions to overcome resistance between the intimate, the art materials, and the external world. I open a topic with photographic clues. Then, deepen the narrative by employing metaphor rather than literal storytelling. Authenticity, representation, and presence, in my view, belong to figurative art. Mechanisms of abstraction generate a discourse with anything I cannot see. Using a symbolic abstraction to convey a contradiction of ideas.
Please stay tuned for full image documentation of my thesis exhibition at the Vermont College of Fine Art.
Paintings
Artist in Residence, Hungarian Multicultural Center, Budapest, Hungary. This project involved general and personal historical research concerning Jewish and Romani migration narratives, which resulted in an abstract visual biographical history. 2015
These are combination pieces of abstracted photographs of details of paintings that I created. I printed photographs of the paintings onto canvas and mounted them on metal. The materials and tools of both the locations and the mediums are combined. Except for one thing: no Photoshop work in making the images. These red images look topographical or like the surface of something like skin, or pond scum because they are part of my Underpinnings project where I research personal and genetic history and figure out ways to represent my findings. I finished these after my residency in Budapest, Hungary. Each piece is 18×20″, oil pastel, canvas on metal. 2015.
![[Re]Telling](http://jwrensupak.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/thumbnail-e1707429212677.jpg "[Re]Telling")
Title: First We Removed our Shoes
Media: Oil paint, mica powder, canvas, hollow core door.
Waves of social amnesia threaten to erase the memories of genocides, including The Shoah. The reason for this includes, in parts, the whitewashing of history, embodied shame and fear, and the realities of what happened to be too excruciating to face. There must be many ways to retain these experiences as historical working knowledge. Human rights, equitable treatment, and natural law, though they are presumed innate, require that we actively fight for them, and when we cannot or are unable to, then such tragedies as genocide do ensue. Zyklon B showers began with cruel deceptions— with slogans in several languages – “Clean is Good,” Lice can kill,” and “Wash Yourself, ” and the prisoners would first remove their shoes and then their clothing on the way to the showers. After their physical destruction, their murderers retained their shoes; why? The Song of Songs 7:2 reads, “How beautiful are thy feet in sandals.” Shoes were considered so crucial that Rabbi Akiva instructed his son Joshua not to go barefoot. They were signs of sensuousness, comfort, luxury, and pleasure. The Talmud (Shabbat 129a): “A person should sell the roof beams of his house to buy shoes for his feet.”Perhaps the shoes were difficult to destroy? Or the Nazis wanted to recycle the leather? Whatever the reason, this one of untold numbers of humiliations enacted by Nazis facilitated physical proof of some of their crimes. With knowledge comes responsibility and action.
Exhibition: [Re]Telling, Curated by Robyn Awend, Director of Visual Arts, sponsored by Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota, & Yad Vashem
Tychman Shapiro Gallery
4330 S. Cedar Lake Road
Minneapolis, MN 55416