14:30 Workshop 1 September 1999
| Wiener Blut - family history inspires one artist to process the past |
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| Artist Melissa Gould (daughter of a Viennese Jew) lived in Berlin from 1986-87. This "total immersion" in history was the motivation for a creative response: a series of projects exploring those dark years - poetic memorials which, for the most part, examine the incorporation of anti-Semitism into everyday life in Pre-War Germany and Austria. She will present her projects as a springboard to discussion. |
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| Melissa Gould is a New York-based conceptual artist whose work centers around history and memory and often deals with issues related to the Holocaust and World War II. She was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I. and Rome, Italy and has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. (Her most ambitious project is an installation piece entitled FLOOR PLAN. A conceptual Holocaust memorial, this work is a surreal recreation of a destroyed Berlin synagogue in the form of a life-size (57 feet by 80 feet) „walk-in blueprint drawing" of the synagogue’s original architectural plan, composed of fluorescent light tubes set into the ground. This project, was first presented at the „Ars Electronica" Festival in Linz, Austria in 1991 and included in the 1995 group exhibition „Light Construction" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.) She was awarded a 1998 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artists’ Fellowship in the category of Architecture/Environmental Structures. She is represented in the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. |
