What Is In Us | Mara Trachtenberg
Opening reception:
Artists’ Talk:
Through disparate approaches, Elizabeth Alexander, Mara Trachtenberg, and Kailey Coppens explore domestic interiors as richly layered visual and psychological terrains where identities, values, and memories are formed.
About “What Is in Us”
Mara Trachtenberg’s exhibition is an immersive installation of animation, collage and sculpture. Blending hand-cut analog with digital processes, Trachenberg has created a new stop-go animation as well as collages with kaleidoscopic wallpaper designs that both camouflage and reveal troupes of hybridized pollinator-insect / humanoid dancers in various formations. Suspended from the ceiling are larger-than-life paper-mache chrysalis forms outfitted with clusters of miniature mirrors and small motors, doubling as disco-balls. These works are propelled by foundational childhood memories the artist cultivated watching dancers on TV in her family’s living room.
“What is In Us is informed by my intertwining relationship with joy and hope, my early visual experiences watching dancers against psychedelic backdrops on television and my love of feminist speculative fiction’s stories of societies existing outside of Patriarchal and Capitalist paradigms,” writes Trachtenberg.
The new work is uncanny and playful, embodying an innate but often hidden capacity for transformation and joy, sending a hopeful message during times of widespread cynicism and collective despair.
About Mara Trachtenberg:
Mara Trachtenberg works in cut-paper stop motion animation, collage, sculpture and installation. Born in Queens and raised in Long Island, New York, she holds a BA in English and Women’s Studies, a BS in Art Education and an MFA in art with a concentration in Photography. Trachtenberg’s Maximalist World Building project, What is In Us Is Among Us explores our world of overstimulation, exploitation and hierarchies both political and social through a feminist lens. Her experimental stop motion animation, Among Us has been screened in “The Experimental Forum”, Los Angeles, CA “The Society for Photographic Education Media Festival”, St. Louis. MO , “Vastlab Experimental Film Festival”, Los Angeles, CA and the “Imagine This, International Women’s International Film Festival”, New York, NY where it received an award for Best Experimental Film. In 2016 and 2020 she received a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography.
Trachtenberg is an adjunct professor of Media Arts at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Ma, The President of Sutherland Welles, Ltd. and a Board Member at Hera Gallery and Educational Foundation.
