Sculpture and Installation
Y2K group at 5A, Brooklyn, NY
Illuminator is an exhibition by Laura Bernstein composed of new sculpture with painting, works on paper and video. In this installation, Bernstein works within the liminal space of pictures and words while drawing on the imagery of anonymous authors who illuminated medieval manuscripts. Illuminator centers itself around a sexless wing finned figure, embedded with candles and barnacles--a humanoid candelabra--dripping, melting and congealing fleshy, gilded wax. Though the monks and nuns who illuminated manuscripts were forbidden from working in the dark or using candles for fear that their illuminations might go up in flames, Illuminator is built to both emit light and act as an alter/vessel for prayer. Presiding over a floor painting depicting the Fall of Babylon as an upside down city inspired by the “Bamberg Apocalypse 1000 A.D”, Bernstein’s works explore loss as a form of transformation that provides clarity of vision. Bernstein meditates on illuminated manuscripts as early picture books, stone animals as gods, and fire and water as fundamental tools for animation. In Pages From An Apocalyptic Picture Book, Bernstein reinterprets thumbnail images from the margins of encyclopedias of western civilization documenting medieval times. Infusing the black and white pictures with color, and adding, omitting or reorienting the composition and scale, Bernstein looks to these flat pictures in an effort to understand images as a form of narrative building and story telling rather than art.
Animals That Turned To Stone is a video by Bernstein made in collaboration with Emily Taibleson on a 2019 trip to Rome, where Bernstein and Taibleson both studied in 2008. Their 2019 trip marks the first time they have both returned. Traversing the city on a “stone safari”, Bernstein and Taibleson went in search of dragons, lions, falcons, serpents, centaurs, Sphinx’s and more to capture and record all the beasts they could find (within reach). Simultaneous to filming, they read to each other aloud from the epic poem “Metamorphoses” by the Roman poet Ovid. Within this digital document, Bernstein and Taibleson contemplate the symbolism, mythology, morality and spirit of the ancient stone beasts filmed within the context of our climate crisis. Propelled by the current administration’s denial of and inability to protect, preserve, and remediate and restore our environment and the countless species at risk of extinction, Animals That Turned To Stone looks to the calcified past to speculate on the petrified future where creatures once alive exist only in stone.