Projects
"Elizavetgrad: I Remember"
Ken Berman’s exhibit “Elizavetgrad: I Remember” includes 30 self-portraits utilizing the artist himself as a contemporary symbol of a historic past-the immigrant experience in America. Elizavetgrad, now known as Kirovograd in the Ukraine, was the site of several progroms beginning in 1881. Berman's ancestors immigrated to America as a result and settled on Water Street in Worcester, Massachusetts around the turn of the 20th Century.
The Immigrant Experience
Immigration has remained a fundamental concern in the American conscious since the Constitution was first interpreted as a means of determining true Americans, and has never been more important than in today's political climate. This exhibition speaks equally to all ethnic groups who immigrated to America and struggled to establish new identities. Against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and Modernism, immigrants struggled to create unsurpassed wealth and security epitomizing the American Dream. However, affluence, erasures of memory and assimilation have diluted historic, ethnic and religious values. Those of us whose grandparents and parents came here with nothing have finally "made it" at great cost. Ironically, little has changed for the immigrants of today. The subject matter of Berman's paintings provokes rememberance of ancestors and values that reflect the desire to assimilate into American culture as in "Screaming Cowboy", "TV Cowboy" and "Young Baseball Player". The strain of cruelty, determination and angst implicit in the immigrant's struggle to survive is painfully evident in Berman's series of wrestling paintings.
Degraded Photocopies
In addition to the Immigrant subject matter, Berman's paintings explore the interplay between traditional painting and modern media. This further symbolizes the relationship of old world and new American values. Photocopies of old photographs have been degraded, reversed, reduced or enlarged, blurred, transferred onto canvass or paper supports and painted over to suggest potential loss of memory and the remnants as well as mutuation of identity. Glazes are sometimes applied to preserve images in a new painterly skin on the picture plane. This refers to and attempts to preserve historic technique and the signifigance of mark-making yet bypass the easy expressionism which pervades contemporary figure painting.
Juror Rachel Vancelette, Director of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York City, awarded the Richard M. and Elaine Rieser Prize to Ken Berman for "Screaming Cowboy" at the 51st Chautauqua National Exibition of American Art, June 29, 2008.
Solo exhibition venues and dates to be announced soon.
