One year ago, Leah and I started a conversation about the qualities of photography and encaustic, a process involving beeswax & damar resin, first used in Fayum mummy portraits in Egypt in 100-300 AD. Each uses the idea of time in similar yet disparate ways. We became interested in how these two different processes could be joined together to speak to the idea of time. Photography as a way of bringing the moment to bear, of not losing the past and as an ephemeral way of remembering. Encaustic, through it’s translucency, can allow the viewer to look back through the layers of a painting, and see how each moment, each stroke, informs the present. Starting with the idea of time, we began to talk about memory and lineage.
What started out, as collaboration on time, memory & lineage has become a meditation on life itself. We have taken boxes from the attic filled with things collected over time through generations-photographs, letters, ticket stubs, something saved and then forgotten. Combining the mediums of photography and encaustic, we have taken hundreds of images, layered them with encaustic wax and placed them on scrolls, wood panels, and light boxes, recreating and reimagining visual histories of lives lived.
Artists Lynn Bregman Blass and Leah Sobsey
Creating visual histories in collaboration with individuals and communities
|
|
Raleigh Metro Magazine
Time Keeps Marching
June 2008, by Louis St. Lewis
"While you are there in the Guild viewing the best of what was, take a few moments to view the installation by two very talented newcomers to the NC artistic landscape: Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman. This is the first collaborative work by these two artists, and I find the result mesmerizing. The creations are about life, loss and memory. Both of these talented ladies come from a Jewish background, and it’s easy to see how family history plays such an important and influential role in their work. Walls are covered with transferred and layered images taken from dusty family journals — all of the joy and pathos of family is right there before your eyes. Who are these people, these old faces, obscured by time and wax? A line of color here, a turn of the head, aunts and uncles forgotten, old love letters, children who never saw adulthood. The encaustic collage works are equally haunting, squares of images to be removed and rearranged according to the viewer’s desire. If you have ever wondered what to do with those old boxes of yellowing family photographs, commission these ladies and watch the magic they create." Louis St. Lewis
|
|
TIME, LINEAGE, MEMORY
An installation in 3 parts
Time takes us with it
Life begins to deconstruct
We take apart the constructs that serve us
Dismantle our story
Here for a short time
Generations came before us
We create our own story where theirs left off
They fade into memory
Leaving us with their stories
Click on small pictures to see a larger version.
|
TIME
 Adding machine tape on scrolls, photo transfers, encaustic. 30ft.x15ft. |
|
LINEAGE
 4x4” Grids of deconstructed photographs, encaustic on Japanese papers, 16”x16”
|
|
MEMORY
photos embedded in encaustic medium mounted on light boxes
|
Our autobiographical installation is in part a way to connect the past to present. It has also been a way to archive moments and fragments that make up histories.
|
|
