Rachel Grobstein
My miniature sculptures and paintings are inventories of daily life. I filter real world objects through a meticulous handmade process, using a radical scale shift to defamiliarize commonly overlooked objects and invite intimate, slow scrutiny.
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My miniature sculptures engage with the tradition of still life, cataloguing an everyday world where routine meets consumer culture and personal history. Presented here are works from a series of boxes and piles that suggest narratives though people are absent, through details like layers of tape. Also presented are works from a series based on the objects found on people's bedside tables. I began by asking friends for pictures of their nightstands, and then expanded the series to a wide group of people across the country. I'm interested in how these collections speak to universal themes, from memory and self care to sex and dreams, and also create complicated individual portraits of their owners.
My miniature gouache paintings are cut from paper and installed directly into the wall with pins. They create an architecture of shadows and reference natural specimens. Works in a current series use themes of space junk, zodiac charts and the mythology of specific constellations to speak to daily routine and consumer detritus . I have been researching how space junk (defunct human-made objects like rockets, satellites, etc) is rapidly accumulating in the earth's atmosphere. I interpret this idea in my work using detritus of consumer culture, out of sight in landfills but not gone.
- Rachel Grobstein
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