"Early Industry in the Arctic" by Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz

Early Industry in the Arctic by visual artist Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz (2010 resident). 

Painting: Oil and photo emulsion transferred onto abraded and rusted Hydrocal plaster, mounted on board approximately 10" x 12" x 1".

I went to the Arctic on a sailing ship in 2013, returning with 2,000 photographs of its astounding landscape. The experience continues to penetrate and reverberate, the more so with every passing headline of melting ice and breaking glaciers. My work uses abraded, traumatized cast plaster as a substrate upon which to house my emulsified photographs comingled with layers of oil paint, employing technique as content.

This painting, based on one of the photos taken during the Arctic trip, depicts a marble quarry operational between 1911-1923 in the high Arctic, abandoned and left to disintegrate. The cuts and mars from a rusted steel plate were imprinted on white Hydrocal plaster, sealed in, and then worked over with paint and photo emulsion. I made this painting following my 2017 show entitled Arctic Abrasions, about which one reviewer said "Climate change is an ideal theme for Spatz....Her works don’t merely picture that. They embody it.”

• Name : Elaine SpatzRabinowitz