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April 27, 2007
With dry and pointed humor
Dorothy Field's latest exhibit features her unexpected sense of
fun.
BAILA LAZARUS
Remember the line in Forrest Gump about life being like
a box of chocolates? "You never know what you're going to get."
The same could be said of Dorothy Field's drypoints – she never
knows what the artwork is going to look like at the end of the process;
and that's just the way she likes it.
Her work involves layering handmade paper (a craft she learned in
Korea) with photocopies of pictures of her relatives and maps of
various European countries. The paper is run through a press once
over an uncut plate with just a background tint, then the collage
is run through again with the drypoint etching. The result is a
unique image every time, with the lines from the etching landing
randomly on the photos and map.
"The layering of paper means lack of control," she explained
to the curious who gathered at the opening of her latest exhibit,
Remnants of Times I Never Knew, at the Sydney and Gertrude Zack
Gallery April 21. "I leave it up to chance where the plate
images combine with the photos."
Those photos tell an interesting story about Field's past and her
unique sense of humor. The pictures come from members of her mother's
side of the family, who have been in New York since the 1860s. Being
relatively well off, they could afford a photographer to take their
pictures. Their ancestry is German Jewry. Thus the titles of the
images read "Max and Marion Mayer...," "Marion Mayer
and her Children...," "The Weiller Sisters..." and
so on.
The oddity is that these images, taken in New York, are overlaid
on maps of countries other than Germany, such as Poland. This is
actually a country from Field's father's side of the family, who
descended from Russians and Poles, and who came to New York in the
1880s. German Jewish society in New York looked down on Russians
and Poles, Field said, explaining that it was considered more of
a shame for a German Jew to marry a Russian or Pole than to marry
a non-Jew. So she decided to have some fun, and has placed the family
photos of her mother's relatives into countries they didn't come
from, as though creating a different past for them.
"None of them belong there," she laughed. "They only
got where they are visually."
Field also wanted to instil in that past an element of Jewish connection,
because she felt her family didn't have that. Thus, one section
of the exhibit has a series of collages where old Jewish holiday
cards (fascinating in their own right) are overlaid with family
photos and simply described: "Harold and Bernice, Older, and
Simchat Torah."
"All of them were so assimilated by the time I was born that
I thought it was a shame that there was so much missing," she
said. "My grandmother probably didn't know anything about Simchat
Torah, so I wanted to give her a background."
Along with this series of her family, created for the current exhibit,
is a collection referred to as the Red Sea series, completed for
a previous exhibit in Victoria, in which Fields depicts the crossing
of the Israelites to freedom.
"We say even in slavery, there's knowledge of freedom, and,
in freedom, there is the memory of being slaves," she said.
"We crossed the Red Sea and we start kvetching, saying how
bad it is, and how it was better in Egypt. We're always messing
around between the places we left and the places we're going to."
This series of drypoints is done in similar fashion to her relatives
series, but with no literal imagery. The "crossing" is
suggested by a contrasting strip of paper laid across the opening
of the matte and the artwork underneath.
The last two elements in the exhibit are a series of large folded
booklets with drypoint images mounted on the pages; and the Wall
series of hanging images. However, neither of these offered as much
visual interest as Field's displaced relatives floating randomly
in countries they would probably never have visited.
Field's exhibit runs until May 27. Call 604-257-5111 or visit www.jccgv.com
for more information.
Baila Lazarus is a freelance writer, photographer and
illustrator living in Vancouver. Her work can be seen at www.orchiddesigns.net.
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