Rachel Stern
Rachel in her studio.
Rachel Stern is a New York City based photographer whose work considers the intersection of beauty and power. Stern turns to the tableaux and the proscenium in order to create a strong dialogue between the histories and uses of kitsch and leftist aesthetics. Using materials culled from strip malls and thrift stores, she creates images which ask art and visual culture to enter into a discourse of accessibility and, in the spirit of ‘bread and roses’, demand immediate access to beauty. Her work images a world that might be built out of the world that is. It is a kitsch paradise, a queer-washed history, and an attempt at hope. She received her BFA in Photography and the History of Art and Visual Culture in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended Skowhegan in 2014, and graduated from Columbia University in 2016 with an MFA in Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brandies University Kniznick Gallery, Ortega Y Gasset Project, Invisible-Exports, and Asya Geisberg Gallery among others. Her work has been featured in BOMB, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, ArtFCity, Hyperallergic, and Matte Magazine.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
My work most commonly takes the form of a constructed photograph. This means setting things up in the studio, be they objects, people or animals, and arranging them for the camera’s vantage. I like to think about using low-fi special effects like those in the films of Georges Méliès where evil nymphs or space aliens can enact powerful magics simply by the stopping and starting of Méliès’ camera at precisely planned moments. In my own photographs, I create encompassing environments and transformational moments using similarly simple tools of deception through perception — in my case mostly what the camera can or can’t see from a specific view point. I like the idea that through my material choices and simple transformations the photographs can exist as a kind of puzzle where, with a little investigation, one can pick apart the scene reordered as one comprised of real objects and materials arranged in real space. This is something that a photographs tells us (all mayhem about its truth value aside): that the things in the pictures once sat before a camera so something of it was real! Since the stuff of my pictures is familiar, it is imagination or faith and the familiarity of the symbols and trope I image that promote them into the realm of the narrative or the critical.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently working on a video project called Greek Chorus. It is a modular video piece where individuals are filmed reading a script by the poet Paul Legault and then presented as a large collective body (a grid of screens) speaking in unison. The piece imagines the Greek Chorus, a collective body, as the main character. It has been especially fun to structure this project because I am building a “Blue Apron” style mail kit (including do-it-yourself makeup tutorial, camera set up guide, popup backdrop, etc.) that allows me to send the set via mail to many different subjects across space and pandemic restrictions. I am still setting up the kit and testing everything but excited to get it out in the mail to the first sitter soon!
Your still lives are amazing! We were hoping that you could expand on the use of candles and nods to the concept of memento mori throughout your practice.
When I make a still life, I try and always include one “active ingredient” — something to emphasize the life part of format. This can be something like ice which we understand always to be melting, fire which moves, transforms, surges, is extinguished, flowers or food which wilt, rot, or droop, the insertion of human hands, or the illusion of suspension or flight. These types of elements create the tension in still life that allows them to be so incisive and familiar — a tension that allows us to understand perfectly the human scene that played out only moments before we catch our glimpse of the array of objects and materials that make up the image.
I am also interested in the idea that the word decay is embedded in the idea of decadence. That, for example, a bubble is especially beautiful because it bursts. Or, more to the point: the gift of a flower is deeply precious because from the moment it is cut and brought in from the garden its death has commenced (by our own hand and for our own pleasure!) We enjoy a flower always in a state of decay and that is its luxury. The symbols of the memento mori exist in this same ethos. My grandfather who escaped Austria after Kristallnacht lived by his motto, “Life is tragic. Enjoy it.” I try to do the same and so what could be a more urgent subject for my work than a reminder (to myself or to anyone else) that, like the cut flower, the journey from life to death has already commenced and to seize whatever opportunities for joy or productivity or curiosity or even heartbreak we might encounter. I bring no novelty to the candle but trust its established symbolic significance (and flexibility, the symbolic differences between unlit, lit, and snuffed are hefty) to carry its longstanding simple and impactful message.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
My work exists in an ever-growing spiderweb of references. I pick through the history of art and expanded visual culture — emojis, civic architecture, religious symbols, propaganda — and, through my materials and conceptual structures, distill these symbols and images through a ‘trickle-down aesthetics.’ Through this distillation I believe we can reveal something of our visual lexicon as a measurable expression of power, something which has a direct effect on all our lives. Recently, I have been working on projects which take the form of visual productions of works of literature. My 2018 project More Weight was a loose photographic production of The Crucible but included images which referenced current events news photography, emojis, and illuminated manuscripts. My references are many and varied and are culled from an aimless experiential research as often as they are derived from a focused, scrutinized and pointed thesis.
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
My answer doesn't really address the question but I am morbidly excited to see the Frick Collection take up residence in the former Met Breuer and former (and always forever) Whitney building on the Upper East Side. It will be a very strange haunting or possession — though, I am unsure if the Frick’s collection will haunt the Whitney’s building or vice versa.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I have an ongoing fundraising project. It is small book, a message in a bottle, called Death of The Heart. The title is taken from something James Baldwin said, “I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” The photographs included have all been made on my cellphone beginning in early 2020 with the initial isolation of the the COVID-19 pandemic, through the ongoing uprising for black lives, and now peaking into the wilds of 2021. The photographs are printed on a thermal printer and presented as a long scroll with a title list inside a small glass jar. Images vary from book to book and build over time as the project is ongoing. I am selling copies of this book through my Instagram @RachelStern. In order to purchase a copy please make a donation to G.L.I.T.S, New Sanctuary Coalition, The Audre Lorde Project, National Bail Out or the Committee to Protect Journalists in an amount of $50 or more and forward your receipt of donation to my email MsRachelStern@gmail.com including your mailing address.
Rachel Stern’s work is included in our show “Eternal Flame,” Jan. 1st – Feb. 28th. Visit her website or Instagram (@rachelstern, @msrachelstern) to see more of her work.