INTERVIEW
‘A way for me to honor them’: artist Jaime Scholnick on her Gaza images
By Carolina A. Miranda
June 23, 2015
From a distance, the dozens of images that hang from the walls at CB1 Gallery in downtown Los Angeles look as if they might have emerged from a highly stylized comic book. Lines in black, blue, yellow and red come together to form pictures of people, urban landscapes and explosive abstractions. But look closer and you will see that the lattice of delicate line work covers an array of photographs: images from the Israeli bombing of Gaza nearly one year ago showing wrecked urban landscapes, mourning women and children picking their way through the rubble.
Artist Jaime Scholnick is generally known for producing sculptures that play with material and form, such as the milled wood abstractions inspired by Styrofoam packaging she showed last year in the spring. But in her latest show at CB1, she takes on a far more visceral topic: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — specifically last summer’s bombings of Gaza.
The exhibition’s title, “Gaza: Mowing the Lawn,” takes its name from a term that has been used by Israeli military strategists to describe the every-few-years bombings of Palestinian territories. Scholnick says the images of the conflict, which she saw bubbling up in the news and in her social media feeds, left her feeling outraged, powerless and conflicted (she is Jewish). Out of a need to face what she was seeing in the photos, she began drawing on the pictures — ultimately producing the 50 works that are now on view at CB1 through mid-July.
The L.A.-based artist took time to chat with me about how the series began, the controversy it has generated for her with her friends and family, and the new public installation in Los Angeles that her work method has inspired.