“Is It Safe?”
I was born “knowing” about the Holocaust. I write knowing in quotation marks because the Holocaust was invariably “there” in every facet of my life. A knowable-unknown, the Holocaust––was in the air that my family breathed.
My grandparents and father escaped the Holocaust, thus making me both a second and third generation Holocaust survivor. My art conceptualizes an inheritance of trauma vis-à-vis my paternal side of the family. At home we played at being a conventional American family. And yet we were far from “American” mainstream subjects. Domestic air–-survival air, exilic air––was the normalcy that sustained the atmosphere at home. It bore witness to the great losses and amazing tales of will and survival by my father’s side of the family.
This series, “Is It Safe,” utilizes photographs of family members who survived or were killed during the Holocaust as narrative backdrops. I use dollhouse size––1-inch to 1-foot scale–– dolls in my art practice to visual stories, echoing the way that I was told tales of war and escape as a child on my grandfather’s knee.
