Women of Valor
Lullaby
Lamentations
Marleene Rubenstein
Artist Statement
Memories and rituals over five thousand years old are an integral part of my daily life, shaping and enriching its practice. This is integral in my art as well, for as Louise Bourgeois asserted, art cannot be separate from life. By using a specifically chosen vocabulary of mixed media, my goal is to create the visual manifestation of an echo - converting the temporal realm into material form.
The injunction to remember is a traditional Jewish responsibility. I do this by creating a bridge from the intangible past to a contextualized site in the present. Discarded possessions, shadows, reflections, layering, erasure, wounding and binding are all processes that I repeatedly utilize in my work. The traditional feminine tasks of repetitive labor, nurturing and healing are a deliberate incorporation in my work, and are embraced as a thread to the past, to the generations of women who preceded me. My working process is labor intensive and this creates its own ritual, embedding a temporal reality into experience that is inherently fragile and tenuous. Creating the manifestation of absence becomes both an act of mourning as well as memorial.
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