Artist Talk with Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Part 2
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
6:00 - 7:30 PM PST
On Tuesday, December 22nd, we were joined for a second artist talk with Rachel Fein-Smolinski, the Juror’s Choice Award recipient of FORECAST 2020. Artist Rachel Fein-Smolinski discussed her projects Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones, and This Woman has ISSUES! and she screened new video work. Fein-Smolinski loves the reprieve of science-fiction and incorporates sci-fi methods of aesthetic and mythological signifiers of resurrection, re-animation, and bad TV doctor acting into her video/photo/installation work. She talked about pain, courage, illness, pleasure and the subjective histories of the western healthcare system buried within institutional medical archives. The work shown included multimedia imagery that she has made with clinical patient photographs, ephemera, and sci-fi tableaux of artifacts mined from these archives. What does pain look like? How do you communicate something as internal and inexplicable as the feeling of pain? How do spineless creatures have sex? What does invertebrate sexuality have to do with how one communicates and interprets pain?
Correspondence from the White House, 2020, cyanotype on the artist’s US stimulus check letter, archival pigment prints on cotton sateen, archival pigment print on paper (top right: clinical photograph Diagnosis– Degenerative Arthritis, 1957–Source: Rare Books and Manuscripts at University of Rochester Medical Center)
Image by T. William Arnold + Kiley Reed Black, 2019
ABOUT RACHEL FEIN-SMOLINSKI
Rachel Fein-Smolinski (b. 1992 Buffalo, NY) is an artist and educator who holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Syracuse University. Fein-Smolinski has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies, and publications, including publication in Kris Graves Project’s Solace, the design, technology, science, and science fiction website Gizmodo. She has received the 2020 Artist Residency at LATITUDE in Chicago, IL, the 2019 Visual Studies Workshop residency, Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts and History of Medicine's Research grant, the 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award for Artists of Excellence with Disabilities, and the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Fellowship 19 International Award Honorable Mention. Her 2019 video, Referred Pain, was shown in the Video in America exhibition at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, SPACES in Cleveland, OH, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. She has had solo shows at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Health Sciences Library.
Fein-Smolinski’s work injects science-fictional visual strategies into the authoritative aesthetics of biology and medicine to address issues of courage, pain, neuroses, and the power dynamics embedded in the Western healthcare system. Her work incorporates photography, video, and sculpture, and she often works with materials from medical archives. She has previously worked as the Digital Services Coordinator at Light Work, a nonprofit photography organization in Syracuse, NY, and is currently a Lecturer of Studio Arts with a concentration in Photography at The School of Art + Design at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Defense against Binocular Disparity, Archival Pigment Print 2020, image on the right is a clinical photograph Diagnosis: Dermatitis, 1936–Source:Rare Books and Manuscripts at University of Rochester Medical Center
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