June 27 – August 29, 2008
Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Domestic Surveillance—Secret Prisons, 2007–08. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.
Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Exercise in Futility, 2008. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.
Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Marginalized, 2006. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.
The emotionally charged installations of Gerda Meyer Bernstein operate on a human scale while addressing issues of great political and moral magnitude. Informed by her personal and family history—the artist escaped Nazi Germany as a child in the Kindertransport while many family members were killed—she explores the difficult question of how individuals should respond to violence, disaster, and injustice. Three recent works, vastly different in media and approach, all probe the interface of humanity and inhumanity. The viewer becomes witness and participant in orderly but disquieting scenarios in which vestiges of human activity as simple as sheets of paper conjure dark events of the past and an ominous future.