Statement
My work has taken a trajectory that began with a focus on fundamental links between the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developed world’, (¡Guatemala! The Road of War, 1986, andThe Global Menu of 1989) to a more explicit placement of myself in the work: as a Jew looking at my relationship to the Palestinian people (Diminish Your Cup, 1992) and as a woman speaking of violence and misogyny (Haarlem, 1993).
Three years ago, at the age of 60, I began a multi-media installation entitled Cassandra: An Opera In Four Acts, the first in a series meant to form an extended autobiographical narrative which accounts for the ways in which the mechanics of history, gender and place intrude their weighty and inescapable presence in our lives. These works will be a culminating endeavor addressing a need I have to understand my life and the forces that formed me, as I stand on the threshold of my old age. Cassandra: An Opera In Four Acts, completed in 1995 and now touring, examines the complexities of the social dynamics in which I grew up: class, patriarchy and misogyny, racism, the catastrophic events of World War II. A subtext which poses questions about the relationship between memory, the past, and technology, can be read in the juxtapositioning of older technologies of communication with newer processes such as digital imaging, recorded voices, and video: the cabinet of a 1940’s radio similar to the one in my childhood home in Montreal, the one in which Hitler lived, houses a tiny video which ‘broadcasts’ images and sounds culled from my past.
Technologies of communication and representation can act as mediating tools by which we may retrieve and reinvent our past (many of the ‘memories’ that I have I only ‘know’ through family movies and photographs). As I continue this project, I will pursue my meditations on the profound implications of technological advances. As we have seen and now experience in anxiety, they can serve as instruments of totalitarian or invisible, benign control.he last two years I have continued working on the series doing research, reading, drawing, and exploring digital imaging processes eventually to be made into quicktime movies and videos which will be components of the new installations. The work is becoming as I am becoming.