| ‹ | Recent Work: Multiplying Time series Florence Mednicow | A contemporary portrait We leave behind things. They are at the same time representations of memory and person. We keep them, sometimes we sell them, but often times they haunt us either way. We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. They conjure a person as past and present forever. Until we leave them behind again. Jeanne Criscola’s time-based installation is a tribute to the memory of Florence Mednicow Sheinfeld who left behind a life now set in a tangible and measurable form. This archive is complete, detailed, and rich—but ordinary, too. Florence left her things to her niece, Jane Lettick, whom Florence and her husband, Natt Sheinfeld, raised after the untimely death of Florence’s youngest sister, Elaine, in 1960. Using a grid structure, Criscola recreates a visual dialogue with graphical properties she found among Lettick’s aunt’s belongings. A narrative comes forth from the every day and includes evidence of Mednicow’s ties to the Orchard Street Shul through the things she left behind: correspondence, invitations, telegrams, ledgers, bills, pictures, letters, news clippings, boxes, and other papers and information. Florence’s collection of personal memories spans the time preceding her birth in 1907 until her death in 1998 at the age of 91.
|