In Conversations with Rzeszow, I am engaged in a dialogue between the familiar and a place I knew initially only through fragmentary stories, silence and the efforts of my own imagination. Rzeszow is a small city in southeastern Poland, where my father grew up within an extensive Jewish community that was destroyed in World War II. As a child I was told little about the fate of my father's family; in recent years I have felt the need to know more. The dialogue in the work involves both images and text. There are several voices: my own, recounting and questioning my perceptions, and quotes from Primo Levi and Francine Prose, more knowledgeable sources, who recount and question theirs. Some of the drawings are about places in Poland: the endless fields of barrack chimneys I saw at Birkenau, a mass grave in the woods near Rzeszow. Others are places I know more intimately: a Minneapolis bird sanctuary, a summer home in upstate New York. The metaphor of place becomes a means to explore many kinds of knowing: one's own direct experience and its limitations, what can be intuited, what is possible to learn at a distance and what cannot, finally, be understood.
Conceptually similar to the photographs of Teicholz is the work of Joyce Lyon, a Minneapolis artist whose father is a Holocaust survivor from Rzeszow, Poland. Most of his family was killed at Belzec death camp. Lyon's situation as a member of the second generation led her to inquiry about relatives who disappeared, about literature and testimony about the Holocaust and ultimately to her own expression, Conversations with Rzeszow: A Dialogue Exploring Different Kinds of Knowing. Conversations is based on a series of paintings that were also transformed into a book of the same title. It is, as Lyon points out, "a dialogue between what is familiar to me...and experiences that I do not-and cannot-know first hand." [18] The artistic aspect of Conversations juxtaposes paintings around Rzeszow, including scenes of mass graves in the Glogow Woods, with remarkably similar landscapes from Minnesota and New York. The message is clear and suggestive of the terrible burden that memory imposes: The similarity of landscape between Poland and parts of North America indicates that memory about genocide can be induced particularly from nonpolitical sources. A bird sanctuary, woods near Tofte, Minnesota, or the remains of a razed hotel from a New York resort have a magical potency of evoking images of isolation and death in Poland's camps and forests. Just as Teicholz's enigmatic photographs of railroad tracks convey a powerful sense of tragedy, so too do Lyon's paintings suggest that the Holocaust's landscape was very much like places we know and enjoy.
from Stephen Feinstein, Witness and Legacy
Media:
Painting and Drawing
(Joyce Lyon's Homepage)Remains of the Razed Hotel, Lake Huntington. 1991.
(Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum)The Experience of Place. 1995.
(artnetweb)
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PICTURES FROM THE EXHIBITION
Bird Sanctuary, Minneapolis I
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Oil stick, 34" x 92"
1991. Collection of the Artist
[ "Pliny" by Primo Levi ]
Chimneys at Birkenau II
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Oil stick, 43" x 60"
1991. Collection of the Artist
Mt. Oberg, Tofte, MN
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Oil stick, 30" x 88"
1992. Collection of the Artist
Mass Grave, Glogow, Poland I
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Oil stick, 30"x 44"
1991. Collection of the Artist
After I Saw "The Partisans of Vilna"
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Text panel, 12 1/2" x 10"
1991. Collection of the Artist
Later, in the New York Public Library
from Conversations with Rzeszow
Text panel, 12 1/2" x 10"
1991. Collection of the Artist