Meridel Rubenstein

Meridel Rubenstein's complex narrative photoworks derive from a keen sense of place, personal history, and myth-the larger terrain of the cultural mind. Her large steel-framed assembled photoworks utilize a nineteenth-century printing process of hand-coating watercolor paper with earth-toned palladium salts. These images on paper have been combined with video and audio works. Most recently they have been transferred to sandblasted glass. For twenty years, Rubenstein's work has focused on subjects generated from her experience of living in New Mexico. Works such as The Lowriders (1980), while originating in New Mexico, have found welcome audiences throughout the country as people have become more sensitive to issues of culture and place. Labyrinths and Constellations ( 1987), seemingly the least site-specific of Rubenstein's work, explores the locus of myth as a factor in establishing identity.

In 1995, Rubenstein completed the glass/photo/video installation Oppenheimer's Chair, featuring the work of thirty-one artists whose installation works deal with the issues of place. Oppenheimer's Chair is a meditation on nature and the shedding of defensive postures after fifty years of the Cold War.

The intersection of the worlds of Native American and the nuclear scientist at the home of Edith Warner during the making of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos is the subject of Critical Mass, her most recently completed work. Representing five years of collaborative work with Ellen Zweig and Steina and Woody Vasulka, Critical Mass will be shown at the International Center of Photography in New York later in 1997. A book is also in progress.

Copyright Frontiers Publishing, Inc. 1997
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