A HAPPY CHILDHOOD
2000
A series of 40 mixed media works on magazine pages, using gouache, graphite, ink, and collage.
Size- 20×30 cm. each (8×12 in.)
The artist reflects on the double consciousness growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. in 50’s and 60’s North America. Using ads from Ladies Home journal and other homemaker magazines, she juxtaposes the idyll of a trouble-free suburban existence with the monstrous but largely hidden reality brought by the many survivors who came over from Europe in those years. The tattooed workers and traumatized teachers at the Hebrew day school she attended, the annual memorial ceremonies, the journals of survivors that began to appear on the shelves of the local library, coexisted with summer camps and Christmas ski trips and all the other trappings of a carefree bourgeois life.
[The series was created originally for the 2000 German/Israeli artists’ symposium Memory and Vision, but was not shown there; instead, the site-specific work 18 Short Ceremonies for a Building of Emptied Rooms was created.
