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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updated 27.11.02 | site designed and maintained by Adrian
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