Rachel Stern
Bio: Rachel Stern (b. 1989, NYC) is a photographer whose work considers the intersection of beauty and power. Stern turns to the tableaux and the proscenium in order to create a strong dialogue between the histories and uses of kitsch and leftist aesthetics. Using materials culled from strip malls and thrift stores she creates images which ask art and visual culture to enter into a discourse of accessibility and, in the spirit of ‘bread and roses’, demand immediate access to beauty. Her work images a world that might be, built out of the world that is. It is a kitsch paradise, a queer-washed history, and an attempt at hope. She received her BFA in Photography and the History of Art and Visual Culture in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended Skowhegan in 2014, and graduated from Columbia University in 2016 with an MFA in Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brandies University Kniznick Gallery, Ortega Y Gasset Project, Invisible-Exports, and Asya Geisberg Gallery among others. Her work has been featured in BOMB, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, ArtFCity, Hyperallergic, and Matte Magazine.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: In her autobiography Living My Life, Emma Goldman describes her love of flowers, fine wine, opera. For her this is the very stuff of revolution—despite her (mostly male) comrades’ criticisms of its bourgeois implications. For Goldman, there is no revolution to fight if at the end of that struggle there is anything less than opera. This is the urgent concern of my work: the dispersal and ownership of beauty. Seeking out the intersection of beauty and power I turn to the tableaux and the proscenium in order to create a a dialogue between the histories and uses of kitsch and leftist aesthetic. My work de-canonizes and reframes the tropes of our expanded visual culture through a critical, kitsch, queer-washed lens. My interest is in the power of our visual literacy. I recognize and pay homage to our collective and spectacular aesthetic agility. My images reconsider the location and meaning of the hero, god, or villain pushing us to think about how we became so toxically masculine, so violently white. I photograph the siren, witch, and nurse considering how we hate, harm, and fetishize the queer, femme, and othered body. My materials place this discourse within a socialist critique of the socioeconomic structures that underscore all of these trials and tribulations. Suspended in the limbo space of the studio where construction and critical reflection are synthesized, my photographs illustrate an emotional response to existing within this continuous moment of eloquent and tragic chaos. Ricocheting through aesthetic politics, social ritual and diverse witch hunts, I consider our precarious positions within history and under capitalism. Understanding a reclamation and redistribution of history and culture as crucially important, kitsch is my means to bring a critical, unnerving set of questions to our most overwhelming predicaments. Kitsch, in its most basic form, is earnestness. Earnestness is closely wed to sorrow and so kitsch occupies a space of rabid desire driven from desperation and heartbreak. My work images a world that might be, built out of the world that is. It is an attempt at hope.