Rosamund Felsen Gallery is delighted to present our first solo exhibition of emerging artist Tamara Sussman. Tamara Sussman's work is a richly layered combination of two practices: visual art and fiction writing. Her visual forms include photography, collage and installation. Her written stories, presented in the context of her photographs and collages, serve to amplify the aura of narratives that waiver beautifully between language and visuality.

In the photographic series Tremble, Sussman tells the story of an ongoing earthquake across eighteen images of a gradually crumbling Los Angeles. The dark story and photo series describes how we become habituated to the changing city, and resist acknowledging its imminent destruction. While the story is fictional, it relates the feeling of an underlying threat that is always present in Los Angeles, situated in a region of routine fires and earthquakes. The text--applied to the inside surface of the plexiglass of the frame-- is a translucent layer hovering in front of the photograph and appears and disappears as the piece is viewed from different angles. In this way, the story is easy to miss at first, much like the earthquake it describes.

Sussman will also show a part of A Palpable Alphabet, a series of framed collages. Each work pairs a short narrative vignette with a letter of the alphabet. The letterforms are presented as collages of Sussman's photographs of body parts, arms, legs, hands and torsos. Together, the text and images focus the viewer's attention on different kinds of emotions and the bodily sensations that accompany them. Once again, the pieces are visually and conceptually startling even as they evoke instantly familiar situations.

For more information please contact Sandy de Lissovoy 310.828.8488

Please join us for the artist's reception on Saturday, Oct. 17th, 2009 from 5 - 7 pm.