Project Statement
My work, “Invented Futures,” began when my late grandfather Jack Gordon gave me Yaffa Eliach’s There Once Was a World, a 900 Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Lithuania, so that I could connect with my family heritage. The book beautifully memorializes daily life in the village where my family lived before the Holocaust. I began thinking about my personal connection to my own Judaism and my recent fear of the growing nationalism in America in relation to this book. Initially I had wanted to create something of a visual archive of what I had learned, something to commemorate the dead. However, in order to avoid perpetuating revictimization, to depart from trauma, I shifted my focus to themes of union, matrimony, heritage, and the collapsing of time and space.
The layers of “Protective Properties” move from the present to the past, from foreground to background. In the foreground, an open palm harbors anonymous miniature figures, a pair protected and perpetuated by kinship – perhaps descendants, children, lovers. The suggested lineage is latent in the golden hand, a pendant passed down to my mother from my grandmother. A portrait of my great great grandfather Dovid Elhanan Moszczenik and his wife Golde look over a flowering hill, to the future. Behind them, landscapes invoke the surreal changes of industrialized society, and further, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located in Berlin, Germany, with its many concrete slabs, or “stelae.” These images are from my grandmother Marilyn Matlin’s National Geographic magazines from the 40s and 60s.
Usage of Heirlooms
Heirlooms are objects with spirits–they are signifiers of love, family, and religious practice. They are talismans, memories, and futures. I hope that my work allows viewers to consider their lives as consequences of the actions of their ancestors, as interlinked, and as part of the objects, ideas, and politics of a “foreign” past.
Artist Bio
Alexander Helmintoller is a self-taught California-based collage artist, graphic designer, and writer whose emerging body of work explores themes of nationalism, memorial, and renewal across generations through critique of Post War American Mythology. Their work also explores the early 20th century displacement of Jewish families as a result of pogroms in Eastern Europe. Elements of bureaucracy and statehood are represented in various forms; junk mail, advertisements, and architecture blur with the personal and are juxtaposed with suggestions of violence and complicity. Helmintoller has had work exhibited by the Vayo Collage Gallery in Rochester, New York, and is currently developing a collage series using a photo archive and chronicle of the Lithuanian shtetl, Eishyshok, from which he traces his lineage.