I was born to Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in the atmosphere of the Holocaust, living amid a plethora of personal accounts, Holocaust photographs and neurosis. I have chosen not to use archival images as symbols because I feel these images, which belong to our collective consciousness, often have a distancing effect on the viewer, because they are so recognizable and therefore emotionally dismissable. These images were photographed in Israel and Budapest in 1991 and 1992. They are intended to summon up associations of the Holocaust. As I smelled the freshly turned-over, rich, amber rows of Israeli earth, I thought about the rows of train tracks, and I still hear the silent screams. I walk through life with a displaced step, therefore I have chosen the triptych form to bear witness to the rhythm of the present-past-present time warp in which I travel daily.
Witness and Legacy contains the work of five artists who represent the second generation. Debbie Teicholz's medium is photography and photo reliefs, highly affected by use of destructive techniques of annulled images, charred wood and color tinting. Her main series, A Prayer by the Wall, contains strong points of reference to the Holocaust, but not in a literal manner. The evocation of images of train tracks, plowed earth, cut trees, targets and a sensitive reflection on decaying landscapes was inspired by the memory of the Holocaust on one hand and experiences in Israel. In Teicholz's photographic triptychs, the landscape of Israel and the Western Wall, the most holy site in Judaism, creates a sense of redemption, transforming the dead landscape of tracks and barren land. Teicholz's identity is strongly influenced by the memory of displacement and, being of the second generation, "My identity was greatly influenced by a past from which I am once removed. My art bears witness to this feeling of displacement, of living in a time warp, where a flashback to the Holocaust takes place simultaneously with events of today." [17] The nonspecific aspects of place suggest the difficulty of memory in identifying places of mass murder. Is this perhaps an allusion to the ethical question about how to commemorate memory in the concentration camps? Should they be left to rot and return to the earth, or should they be preserved in a fashion that might become mini-amusement parks?
from Stephen Feinstein, Witness and Legacy
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PICTURES FROM THE EXHIBITION
Untitled
from Prayer by the Wall
Photograph, 35" x 64"
1991. Collection of the Artist
Untitled
from Prayer by the Wall
Photograph, 35" x 64"
1991. Collection of the Artist
