Tamara Wasserman

Artist’s Statement

I love reading. Since I was a child I had certain books that I kept reading over and over again. When I would go back to a favorite book I had read before, it usually surprised me.

I perceived the same text differently every time. The text stayed the same, of course, but since I was at a different point in my life, it somehow felt changed. Each time, my thoughts, feelings and experiences were reflected in the book. I identified with the characters, but also used their story to take a new look at my own.  In this way our favorite books show us the new and the unexpected at each reading.

This is very similar to the way I work in art, to the way I build or construct or tell my visual stories. Whether abstract or extremely figurative, I insist on creating breaks in the space/time continuum of an art piece. This lets the  “things” come together differently every time a person looks at the work. It also prevents the viewer from “taking in” the whole painting at one glance.  A viewer has to take time looking, because the pieces don’t quite fit.  My artistic method encourages people to constantly disengage and engage again, to stop and start looking again. I am offering a viewer “a set of things,” and the viewer arranges them differently every time.

My art offers a world where “the puzzle” does not come together the same way every time. It is not a coherent, finished narrative, although a narrative it often is. The process of looking at my work is jumpy, uneven and it requires time.  And it is this time aspect that connects us back to reading and to the miracle of rereading the same book, similar to taking a second or a third look at the same painting or collage, while changing the route our eyes already followed at a certain moment in the past. 

Tamara Wasserman

June 2012, Chicago, USA

Statement/Manifesto

*Absorb the immediacy of experiences and turn it into art

* Respond to the rhythm, life and color of a situation

* Roll with the moment

* Play with objects (they are not artifacts yet)

*Extend the life of the temporary

* Bridge between the art and the non-art, creating the new-pop-art culture

* Fight the inertia

Recent exhibitions and performances

2012 Paper Boat Puppet Group performs in numerous Chicago Public Library locations

2012 CWCA Women History Month Exhibition, Northern Trust Bank, Chicago

2011   Curated and participated in: "Ballou and You", the Chicago Artist Month exhibition, Chicago

2011  Participted in Fanthom  Gallery's "Art-Hive" project for the Milwaukee Ave. Art Fest, Chicago

2011    “Sanctuaries in Time”; National Juried Exhibition of the Jewish Artists Network, Kraft Center for Jewish Life at Columbia/Barnard University, New-York City

2010    “No Place Like Home”; a juried group exhibition of women art at the Koehnline Museum of Art,  (Oakton Community College, Desplaines, IL)

Oct. - Nov.2009  Down to There: Women and Their Relationship to Hair; a juried group exhibition at the Koehnline Museum of Art (Oakton Community College, Desplaines, IL)

October 2009  Chicago Revisionists: History, Memory and Dreams group show at the Phantom Gallery, Chicago

September 2009 Featured Member Artist on the Women Caucus for the Art website, http://www.nationalwca.org

June 2009       The Square Foot Show, Galaxie. Chicago          

June 2009 The Little Black Book group exhibition, showcasing the artistic process from sketches to finished artwork, Mills Pond House Gallery, St. James, New York, http://www.stacarts.org

2009   5th Annual National Self-Portrait Online Exhibition, 33collective Gallery, Chicago, IL

2009  rEVOLUTION: Making Art for Change, The Art Lounge, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

2008 - 2009  The Healing Power of Art; an online juried exhibition, the Excellence Award, 

  http://www.manhattanarts.com/Galler...

2008 Chicago Art Open 2008, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL USA 

2008 A solo exhibition at the Bankoff Gallery of the Jewish Federation of Saint Joseph Valley in  

 South Bend, Indiana 

2008  Group show at the Durstadt Gallery at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (part of the 

 rEVOLUTION: Making Art for Change project) 

2008 Sustaining the Environment, an ongoing on-line exhibition of art-cards, made from and on recycled  materials, http://wcaartwavesinternational.blo... 

2007 Words Within -  National Juried Exhibition  of the Jewish Artists Network, Kraft Center for Jewish Life at

Columbia/Barnard University, New-York City (February/March) and Rubin-Frankel Gallery at the Boston University Hillel (April/June)

 WEBSITE:

http://www.paperboatart.com