ART214: Artist Blog

I attended Dafna Steinberg’s lecture on March 1st. She gave an overview of various photographic and collage-based projects she did throughout her life, beginning in her early college years. A lot of her early pieces focused on her body image and identity, and she used self-portraiture often. At one point, she said that what made her self-portraits feel so real and vulnerable was that she took pictures of herself every day until her body felt not like a set of moving parts, but like “her.” Her later work–following her father’s death–pivoted to explore themes of death, grief, and the inevitability of loss. Photographs and mixed-media works included imagery of dead animals, particularly birds and deer. She titled this program “Everything You Love You Will Lose” after a Kafka quote. This program was followed by a second part, with the name drawn from the second half of the Kafka quote: “But Love Will Return.” Steinberg also briefly discussed an upcoming photographic project, “Woman in White,” inspired by common tales of tragic, ghostly women in white haunting old houses and other forgotten spaces.

Steinberg’s programs in the wake of her father’s death particularly spoke to me. Drawing imagery from dreams and significant life events–like her experiences with deer and her dream about them–is something I like to do in my own art, and she inspired me to try leaning a little more into that. In relation to what we’ve discussed in class, I was particularly interested in her collage work. Despite the difference in medium (traditional vs. digital), I think it was wonderful to see some amazing examples of collage composition. Her compositions masterfully integrated text and image.