Mythology of Motherhood: Deborah Wasserman
Deborah Wasserman was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, she grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is currently living and working in NYC. Wasserman is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited in the USA at The Queens Museum Of The Arts, The Bronx Museum Of The Arts, White Columns, Pierogi 2000, Socrates Sculpture Park, and A.I.R gallery. Internationally, Wasserman has shown in Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel.
Wasserman is a grant recipient of the Experimental Television Center, Aljira Center for the Arts, the A.I.M. Program at the Bronx Museum and the America-Israel cultural foundation. She received an IAP Social Practice fellowship from NYFA in 2017, a grant from the Puffin Foundation in 2018, a grant from the Citizens committee for New York in 2019, and a Queens Council On The Arts New Work grant in 2020. Wasserman has been awarded a Su- Casa award from the New York State Department Of Cultural Affairs every year since 2015. In 2021 she was invited to attend Aunt Karen’s Farm residency as well as the Skowhegan Alumni Residency. In addition, Wasserman is a Finalist for the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship 2020 in the category of Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts.
“Throughout my life, I’ve been a wander woman, a nomad, and a seeker. I paint landscapes as a way to deepen and extend my roots, ruminate on the places I’ve seen, and express my impressions of the landslides of the present day.
A person is a mold of the landform of their birth but also a creator of their own terrain. I wish to fuse my personal impressions of the Brazilian, “Indigenous” and lush lands, where I was born, and the war-torn coasts in the Middle East, where I was raised, with collective narratives of roaming on this shared terrain, at this landmark.
Not above, but below, the landscape is our body, a mother, a womb, origin, and destination. I paint the ground to hold and capture the world in a frame, to mold the pigments as a living, breathing clay, that shapes my native land.
My painting process entails multiple actions of layering, pouring, dripping, spilling, erasure and mark-making. Surfaces and images get erased as they emerge, painted over as they solidify, and then altered again, leaving behind the rich soil of the under-paint. My impulse to destroy is as fierce as my motive to create.I paint on the wall, floor, and table, mimicking the wanderer’s frequent relocations, traveling on the canvas, North, South, East, and West, where the flow of image and gestures I’ve picked up along the way, spring up.
Applying layers of translucent paint from brightly colored grounds to nuanced earth tones I merge modernism with the traditional application of oil paint.Stained rags and torn clothes, ‘lowly,' and ’discarded,' aids in my humble labor, worn on my and my children’s skin, get adhered to the surface, as ‘body,' as abandon, as an alchemical process, as recycled form and matter, as evidence of process, a woman’s labor, unseen.
My paintings and drawings, realistic, abstract, and magical, depict inner and outer terrains that allude to the body, to the earth, to paths and physical quests. Flora, fauna, and the elements of fire, water, earth, and sky are all manifestations of inner vistas as much as outer typographies, rooted in meditations of life, cycles of time, and change.
The lands which I paint are often hybridized, conjuring multiple sources, climates and terrains, a synthesis, a migrant’s mind. I weigh on the personal and collective narratives of wanderings on our life-giving earth, the grounds which are rapidly cracking under the heavy stomping of our feet.
With striking paint marks, suggestive and realistic imagery, I depict sunken houses, mountains speckled with tents, piles of stones, cut trees, and rings of smoke. I often meddle with perspective, merging the ‘horizon line’ into a swirling tapestry of shifting forms, like our crumbling terrains.
Alongside these prophecies, are utopian vistas of another materiality, with fervent beauty, untouched and unburdened by our hardened reality. With paint and a brush, through colors, movement, and depth of emotion, I enter a doorway, away from relativity, where I’m in the perfection behind this duality. It’s my passion, inspiration and striving to share this vista that sparks so brightly, an invitation to another actuality.”
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