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Rosa Naparstek

I work with found objects, family photographs and text (original nursery rhymes). I explore both the "ordering of things" — how we attach meaning to "random" juxtaposition of objects — and "the order of things" — looking at our inner landscapes for the emotional roots of the world we create personally and politically.

Much of what I do centers around childhood memories and experiences and is concerned with questions of cruelty and its source within us. I believe the fundamental human questions are about good and evil and that each person, culture, and even each civilization asks these through the lens of its own experience. Since I can remember, I have wanted to know what makes human beings capable of cruelty.

I have come to believe that the primary source of evil lies in our ability to deny our own pain, fear, and vulnerability. In our mistaken belief that we can protect ourselves from life as it is, we inflict the worst horrors onto others and ourselves.

My pieces begin in flea markets, empty lots or on the street somewhere between gutter and sidewalk, pavement and grass. Something dropped, lost, thrown away is seen in it’s most pristine self — shape, color. I place what I bring in wherever I find room combining happenstance of space with happenstance of choice. A rusty knife lies next to a photograph next to a blue tile leaning on a shelf. A small white plastic arm hangs from a grate set by a basket of broken frames. And I wait — days, months or even years for meaning to accumulate beyond compare contrast, name, if A then B — until cutting across time and space an arm, a grate, and shell become the Rosetta Stone.

T: 212.740-9378
E:

Art Types • Mixed Media • Sculpture

 

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