FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Photographs by Leslie Starobin on Display at The Gallery at Fort Point Framers, Boston

Works Depict Life in the Midst of War and Terror in the Middle East, Russia

  

BOSTON, Massachusetts (January 9, 2002)

 

On January 18th, the Gallery at Fort Point Framers opens an exhibit of digital photomontages by Boston artist Leslie Starobin. “The Work of Leslie Starobin” will be on display at the gallery through February 22, 2002.   An artist’s talk is scheduled at the Gallery on January 26th, at 2:00 PM.   The exhibit will feature a dozen works stemming from Starobin’s recent travels to Russia and Israel, as part of a sabbatical project “From Moscow to Jerusalem: An Artist’s Search for Roots.” The turbulent geo-political landscape of these two regions of the world, where the artist has ancestral and family ties, has shaped her artistic vision and iconography. In the aftermath of September 11th, Starobin’s images have a striking relevancy for Americans coping with terrorism on their own soil.

 

The exhibit will feature a number of Starobin’s captivating photomontages, in which raw photographic elements from Russia and war-torn Israel—graffiti covered walls, fortresses, memorial sites, burial grounds, bomb shelters, and sculpture parks full of fallen Communist idols—are combined with personal iconography such as identity cards, exit visas, and maps. The resulting images are both lyrical, and poignant, suggesting the myriad ways in which the political is interwoven with the personal, the extraordinary with the ordinary.

 

Starobin travels extensively to make her photographic negatives, which are the blueprints for her montages, but she composes her pieces in a studio just outside Boston. With the help of technology, Starobin notes, she no longer has to think of the photographs she takes back with her as “indelible negatives frozen in time and space.”  Instead, each negative is scanned into the computer and converted to a single layer in a larger file of multiple layers – like overlapping sheets of acetate – which make up one montage.  Using sophisticated image-editing software, each layer can be individually and finely controlled, allowing some to be partially transparent, others to be partially translucent. “The computer, as an artist’s palette, helps me blend these disparate worlds of culture and politics into compositions of visual fusion and tension,” observes Starobin.

 

Events in the news—even long before September 11th—have frequently found their way onto her canvases. “Often when I work in my studio, I listen to international news on the radio.  This background noise inevitably acts as a muse, shaping and reshaping my ‘raw material’ into compositions on the computer monitor. But these images are also autobiographical. Embedded in these works are pieces of my own history--passports, identification cards, and other artifacts from family archives.”

 

In Starobin’s photomontage “The Shelter,” for example, a cartoon couple with gas masks made from strips of newspaper sits back to back against a pink wall.  Starobin says the work was created in response to a phone conversation she had with her in-laws, as they prepared a chemical-proof room in their Tel Aviv apartment a few years ago, should Iraq attack Israel again. The piece has new meaning in the wake of September 11th, as the artist grapples with ways to protect her own children from bio-terrorism here in Boston.

 

 “Unearthing Nazi Secrets…” is derived from Starobin’s recent trip to Russia and Belarus.  A row of rock shaped skulls lies embedded in earth and trees, a monument to Nazi atrocities committed on Communist soil. 

 

The theme of living with and amongst terror is echoed in Starobin’s still photographs, as well. “Shalom Chaver” is a close-up view of the official memorial to slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, located only a block away from the artist’s Israeli relatives’ home in Israel. Bisected by a dramatic angle of light, this image of the memorial is a stark reminder of the religious fanaticism pervading modern societies.

 

With her pictures on exhibit until the middle of February, Starobin is hoping that visitors to the show take solace in her work, but also find a cautionary tale.  “ So many people in this country associate places like the Middle East and Russia/Eastern Europe with war, destruction, and social chaos. I hope that people who come to my show see the beauty that these places offer, but also come to understand more about the dangers that religious extremism and authoritarianism pose to what we all hold dear.”

 

About Leslie Starobin

 

Leslie Starobin’s work is in the collection of a number of major American museums, including New York’s MOMA, Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.  Her work has been exhibited at the Rose Art Museum, the Duke University Museum of Art, and the National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.  Starobin is a 1995 recipient of a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, as well as an earlier NEA grant, and is on the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Framingham State College.

 

 

The Gallery at Fort Point Framers is located at 300 Summer Street, Suite M4 in Boston, Massachusetts.  “The Work of Leslie Starobin” runs from January 18 – February 22, 2002 with an artist’s talk scheduled for January 26th at 2:00 p.m.

 

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 

 

For more information, call 617-482-4685.  The artist’s web site: www.starobinartworks.com