Memories and rituals over three thousand years old are part of my daily life.  By using a specific vocabulary of mixed media, I create the visual manifestation of an echo, converting the temporal realm into material form.  This has a particular resonance for a postmodern generation, obsessed with the appropriation of memory but permitting the dynamics of selective amnesia.

 

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 bandaging are all processes that I have chosen to use as specific vocabularies in my work.  My process is often labor intensive and this creates its own ritual, embedding a temporal reality into experience that is inherently fragile and tenuous. The metaphor of absence and loss evidence a slippage from the original referent so that the signifiers become auratic objects, charged presences imbued with power, referencing the past but retaining their own particularized identity because they are situated in the present.

 

Creating the manifestation of absence becomes both an act of mourning as well as memorial, creating a visual relationship between the past, myself as conduit, and my viewer.

 

- Marleene Rubenstein