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September 27 - October 22, 2004

Pauline Jakobsberg
A Story to be Told

Artist’s Statement

The hand pulled print has been my medium of expression for 26 years. My art draws upon the history of two families, mine and my husband’s, bound by common threads of tenderness, caring and humanity, in the midst of chaos and hope. My recycled handmade papers, inks and methods suit my goal in an effort to recreate the complexity of the past. The need to tell a story through my art and give substance to the memories of those before us was there early on but did not surface until I became, in a sense, an orphan ten ago. The driving force behind my work is inspired by my husband’s family who were Holocaust survivors as well as my own American roots, memory drawings, journals, found objects, countless stories from parents and grandparents and, last but not least, the tin pan alley imagery of the garment district. Most of the memorabilia I have been fortunate to inherit conveys a familiar story, whether from childhood or my research and travels to seek out surviving relatives. Time and again, what I uncover reminds me of my inability fully to grasp the past, as I turn history into a visual reality, reflective, quiet, intimate, and sometimes playful.

My techniques range from drypoint, etching, non-acid intaglio and silkscreen to collagraphs, monotypes and combinations of two or more of these. They can employ virtually any material on which ink can be applied into on onto paper, cloth, wood, metal and plastic. Some of my art is densely overlaid screen printed images from photos, drawing and letters on a variety of handmade papers and previously etched sheets to recreate the complexity of accumulated memories and unite them into a coherent whole. During the transfer of letters, the written words can fade or disappear, but I try to retain enough to tease one’s curiosity, pulling in the viewer for a closer look. I delight in those times when my art conjures in the mind of the viewer some memory of his or her own, which is often shared with me.

Pauline Jakobsberg

About the Show

The prints of Pauline Jakobsberg evoke a sense of timeless memory. With images drawn from the snapshots and letters of family members and their friends who lived through the difficult years of World War II both in Europe and the United States, Jakobsberg seems to peer through the mist of history and family tales, as if in so doing she could somehow change the endings. The muted colors and partially-obscured details suggest that the prints, themselves, are faded artifacts, objects left over from a time that lives only in equally-faded memory.

One of the unique elements of Jakobsberg’s prints is that they are, in fact, unique. Artists usually employ printing techniques to make multiple, nearly identical, copies of a single image, designating each individual print by its number in an edition. Most of Jakobsberg’s works, however, are designated as number one of an edition of one (noted as 1/1 in the list of works). That is because even when she uses the same plate more than once, she uses it in different combinations with papers, colors, and other plates. These changes, often subtle, lead the viewer to see different emphases, different readings, different meanings.

While most of the works in this exhibition come from what Jakobsberg terms her “inheritance,” five works are drawn more immediately from her own life. In “Garment Center Sample Case,” “Garment Center Sample,” and the collagraph plate used to print these blouse images, she remembers a childhood in which her father’s New York garment district samples of women’s clothing cluttered a small apartment and filled her imagination. Many years later, in “Sixty, Thinking Twenty” and “The Runway,” she continues to consider the implications of using clothing to define one’s place in life.

Pauline Jakobsberg has been a printmaker for many years, and is one of the co-founders of the Washington Printmakers Gallery. In addition to many solo and group exhibitions in the Washington area, New York, and San Francisco, her work has been shown at the Terezin Museum in the Czech Republic; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and numerous other international venues.

Deborah Sokolove
Curator, Dadian Gallery

send comments or questions about the gallery to the curator at:
dsokolove@wesleysem.edu

the copyright of individual works of art belongs to the relevant artist
please do not copy or distribute