Women
Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles
March 11 – April 22, 2017
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to present “Women” by Rebecca Bird. This exhibition presents monumental scale paintings based off of photographic images
of cross-generational women. The paintings are situated in allegorical juxtaposition to
create a dialogue between tropes of womanhood and the act of posing for a photograph.
The images typify the independent kind of historic record made possible by home
photography, that made by families and individuals for their own purposes, to create a
record of their existence and appearance. The scale of the works evoke the tradition of
History Painting, reenactments of moments for the historic record, once considered the
highest genre of painting based on the importance of the subject, the acts of great men.
These works contrast with History Painting in that the moments depicted are mundane
and the figures unknown.
Additional works in the exhibition explore the notion of Sigmund Freud's theory of Screen
Memory, in which an individual's construction of a false memory or cover story is used to
replace an anxiety producing memory. Screen Memory takes a double meaning in this
presentation as it also refers to film, national and popular history superimposed over
private or domestic history. The Screen Memory paintings are based off a photograph of
a nuclear bomb test and in Bird’s work explosions represent immeasurable traumatic
experiences. Her process of recreating the image of nuclear bomb explosions multiple
times implies the process of retelling and construction of memory into a Screen Memory.