[caption id="attachment_1589" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Rebecca Bird, "P H" (2007), courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles."][/caption]
Guillaume Wolf was at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles with artist Rebecca Bird for her opening entitled “Everything That Ever Existed Still Exists” on March 14, 2009. After the jump, hear about the show in Whitewall’s first podcast.
Click here to listen to: the Whitewall Conversation with Rebecca Bird
Transcript:
WHITEWALL: Rebecca, in your exhibition there are a lot of explosions. Why did you decide to do explosions?
REBECCA BIRD: I found this imagery when I was looking for a language to talk about trauma and problems of empathy and human communication, understanding, and inability to understand other people’s experiences.
WW: In what way do these explosions relate to that subject?
RB: I was trying to picture the way a person might visualize something painful, visualize their own emotions, an interior picture you might have of something painful. I started working with explosion images and something that’s really important about this as a metaphor to me is that there’s a complete lack of proportion to it. It’s a completely overblown metaphor but it suits people’s inability to scale their own experience. And there’s something else about the imagery in that when you look at these pictures it’s hard to understand what you’re looking at, at first, which is like trying to look at someone else’s experience.
WW: What we see is your representation of inner emotional experiences.
RB: Yes.
WW: What I found interesting, looking at your work, is that nuclear explosions are usually red and colorful and you chose to completely reverse the color palette. There’s a dominance of blue color in all of your pieces.
RB: That’s right. I started out trying to make something really big and explosive and I realized that actually what suited the subject better was to make something small or cold. A lot of the pieces are cerulean blue and they look like they could be made out of ice.
I’m working in the context of a world that is in crisis
WW: When I looked at your paintings I see that you compare them as animals or jelly-fish and I really feel that they have a strong presence, like living, organic entities.
RB: They grow on the page. They have a life that happens on the page. There’s something in that that mirrors going through a process of trauma or going through a crisis.
WW: When I look at a piece like “N” that stands for “Nagasaki” I thought that it was relevant to today’s current events with the major economic crisis. And I thought it was a powerful image that to me suggested that we all need this huge explosion in our life, in society, to reset, maybe an inner explosion, to reset everything down and then rebuild something positive around it.
RB: The reason I have abbreviated titles that have some historical content like Nagasaki or Pearl Harbor is I don’t want any explosive historical or didactic content in the pieces and yet I’m working in the context of a world that is in crisis and where issues of empathy are essential to our continuance.
WW: So for you, the issue of empathy is a very important thing that is not necessarily addressed in our world?
RB: Absolutely. Ultimately my work is about empathy, something that’s happening inside of you, or between people or our ability to look into each other’s experience.
[caption id="attachment_1607" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Rebecca Bird, "Tree," courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles."][/caption]
