pam skelton

Exhibition open to the public on
Fridays 2-7pm,
Saturdays 9am-noon
18th May - 6th July 2002
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Keppel Street,
London WC1E 7HT

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

The X Mark of Dorah Newman
Pam Skelton
2002 version
Mixed media
24 pieces of 30 x 30 x 5 cm
1 piece of 73 x 32 x 4.5cm

In her video installations and paintings Pam Skelton's work touches upon issues around racial hygiene and the legacy of eugenics. Much of her work has focused on specific sites, places that usually have been marked in the past by particular events or disturbing histories. She has visited Eastern Europe several times and these journeys have informed a series of video installations that consider the Chernobyl accident and the Holocaust. Biological and social memory are recalled in a recent series of paintings ‘Pamela Hurwitz and her friends’ (2001) that use the karyotype of four friends to create their painted portraits each painting designed to reveal the ‘character’ of the donor.

For Hygiene, Skelton is showing a new version of ‘The X Mark of Dorah Newman’ a work where the presence of the human karyotype suggests both the individual and group. The X Mark brings to mind the discredited study of eugenics and the usually neglected and marginalized histories of immigrants, their origins and rites of passage, through an interplay and layering of images which suggest like ghostly forms the last remaining traces of the old immigrant neighbourhood in Hull.

Pam Skelton is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and co-curator of Hygiene, The Art of Public Health. She is also the co-curator, editor and contributor of the exhibition and book ‘Private Views’, Contemporary art from Britain and Estonia. Her exhibitions include, ‘Ghost Town’, The Brno House of Culture, Brno Czech Republic, 2001, Private Views, Muverszetert Kozlapitvany, Dunaujvaros, Hungary, 1999, The Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn 1998. ‘The Unthinkable is the Unknowable - Ten Years after Chernobyl, Camerawork, London, 1966 Kunstler forchen nach Auschwitz, Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany, 1966 Camerawork, London 1996, After Auschwitz Installations, Imperial War Museum, London1995.


Associated site

http://www.oef.org.ee/scca/private/exhibition.html

 

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