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Artist Talk on film, produced by Voices of Contemporary Art (VoCA)
This Talk features artist and quiet activist Jill Slosburg-Ackerman in conversation with fellow artist and arts administrator Mira Friedlaender. Filmed on March 24, 2023 in Slosburg-Ackerman’s studio in Somerville, MA, the two discuss her artistic evolution, influences, and work with jewelry, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Their dialogue reflects on the artist’s transformational use of materials such as wood, sawdust, and found furniture to investigate relationships between nature and culture.
RESTLESS SHELVES and PSYCHOPHANT
Restless Shelves and Psychophant is a book of pictures and stories, a book about human nature. When visual artist Jill Slosburg-Ackerman read Primo Levi’s “Psychophant”, a short story about a device that generates uncanny sculptural portraits, she was inspired to offer her own hybrid sculpture-shelves (or are they shelf-sculptures?) to friends and acquaintances to collaborate with her by putting these objects “to use”.
This book contains Levi’s “Psychophant”, and a catalogue of Slosburg-Ackerman’s Restless Shelves in her studio and in the spaces of her collaborators. The tête-bêche (head-to-tail) format of this artist’s book binds their work together.
See press release here.
Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian writer, chemist, partisan, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of short stories, essays, poems, and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, an account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and The Periodic Table, a collection of autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.
Jill Slosburg-Ackerman is an interdisciplinary artist and quiet activist. Her metaphysical jewelry, drawing, sculpture, and installations in wood, often made with discarded furniture and the scraps from her working process, emanate from her interest in ensembles and the often-contradictory nature of relationships. Trained as a jeweler and a sculptor, with a BFA and MFA from the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Slosburg-Ackerman is Professor of Art emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, the Bunting Institute, Anonymous Was A Woman, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
photos: Mario Monge & Julia Featheringill