"Like with most families, the secrets that we’ve long held continue to wreak a certain havoc with the present...Taboos to be probed, fondled, perhaps disclosed or at least be made conscious of." Amy Trachtenberg
"Like with most families, the secrets that we’ve long held continue to wreak a certain havoc with the present...Taboos to be probed, fondled, perhaps disclosed or at least be made conscious of." Amy Trachtenberg
AMY TRACHTENBERG
Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1955, Amy Trachtenberg’s work spans painting, sculpture and installation and includes design for theater, dance and public space. Her work has been shown and is held in the collections of The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and The Haitian Embassy in Paris. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.
amytrachtenberg.com
Part #2 - LABA PROJECT
Winter 2023
Everything is at least three things: the one you see, the one you think you know and the one you remember
silver-plated Sabbath candlesticks from Poland: human hair, soil and steel cart; wool coat with synthetic lining and linen on moving blanket; wood figure on textile; various pieces of clothing, plexiglass and found frame; chapbook
Each of these works draw on the poetics of cast-off materials, accidental incidents and indexes of human touch. The inversion of a worm-eaten wooden figure allows for its transformation and questions whether such a gesture is liberating or blasphemous. The unstitching and splaying of a woolen coat, the balling up and nominally preserved vestiges of hair lost, the revealing of the cavities of sliced Sabbath candles are records of actions that mine the pathos and transience of objects. The chapbook Rose Madder Lake took off from the aura of the Transatlantic trajectory of such candlesticks inside the coat of my great grandmother. Textiles, clothing, and color elicit emotion while their materiality and shapes entice memory. If the world itself can be my palette, the objects, collected, dismantled, and reconfigured contain multitudes.
“And he said: what pledge shall I give thee?” And she said, thy signet and thy cord, and thy staff that is in thine hand; and came in unto her and she conceived by him,” Genesis Chapter 38.
Part #1 - Explore
Spring 2023
We are 1/3 through the year-long LABA fellowship. Tell me what you are thinking so far about the theme of TABOO and your current project idea inspired by it.
To build new installations in paint and collage that are woven, glued, stapled, suspended, behind scrims with projections and laid out on the floor.
Expanding upon my history with readymade and found objects to evoke the poetic from the everyday while transcending the usefulness of any given material.
To work without prohibitions or exclusions. To continue forward in uncertainty while generating visual situations that rouse awareness of the body and mind.
Combining the personal and the political towards the poetic. Expand my working mediums to more frankly include language.
LABA studies and conversations have provoked a delving into textual research as I also make inroads into broader Jewish and my own familial history. Like with most families, the secrets that we’ve long held continue to wreak a certain havoc with the present. What I have believed and upheld as truth, nearly sacred, as defining traits within my family and for myself have been under assault due to dramatically unexpected confessions, diagnoses and the revisiting of memories once considered solid. Taboos to be probed, fondled, perhaps disclosed or at least be made conscious of.
IMAGE: Continent, 2022. Disassembled bras, dye, acrylic paint, twine and wire by Amy Trachtenberg
