November 24, 2017 – February 22, 2018
Opening Reception | Dec. 5 | 7 – 9pm | FREE
@ Makom – 402 College St
Noted author of I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors and international-exhibiting artist Bernice Eisenstein opens the pages of her meditation on language, books and memory in a new site-specific installation. A long table is laid with an assortment of open books, each intricately manipulated and embellished by the artist who folds, paints, scribes and reinvents the pages of works by the likes of Albert Camus, Stefan Zweig and Robert Walser. Their poetic, philosophical writings are transformed into musings on “nothing and all,” a phrase drawn from a poem by Mark Strand. A large painted group portrait hangs in the window, based on a wedding photograph of the artist’s family taken on the cusp of the Second World War. Lost and unknown ancestors are audience to both this eclectic library and passersby on College Street. The painting and the exhibition as a whole become a palimpsest – an entirely new, pulsating creation revealing traces of what came before.