Artist Interview - Rachel Feinstein
In all your art, your "hand" is highly recognizable: sharp shadows, saturated hues, those reds... in a word, "Technicolor!"
I found my style through lots of trial and error. At the end of college, we created a thesis. Through months of research, I began to create images that felt like cinematic stills to create the work that became Untitled: Insignificant Moments. Throughout the process of creating this work, I knew I wanted to use harsh shadows to really elevate the mystery and tension in each image. This, combined with the bright color theory that
Rachel Feinstein
was woven in throughout the project, is what became my "style." Once I had the first shoot and saw the images that were created, I knew this was how I saw the world and how I was going to be able to show the world through my own eyes. The bright flash almost gives it a paparazzi feel to some of the images, which cultivates this feeling of intrusion into a world we were not necessarily invited into. That exact feeling is how I had always felt being a woman in this world, and being able to showcase this in my work was such an exciting feeling.
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What's your elevator pitch? What do you say when an interested artist, curator, gallerist, or civilian says, "Tell me about your work."
I would say, “My work explores femininity and the tension between beauty and discomfort. I’m inspired by old Hollywood films that once defined femininity but also limited it. My photographs balance softness with unease, revealing the emotional weight behind idealized images of femininity. I’m interested in that space where beauty starts to feel like tension.”
Yours is socially "conscious" art, anchored to a personal and general politics. What is the message you'd like to see your audience take away?
My method centers around the space that women have held and do hold in society by using tropes and pieces of the past to emphasize how the world has put women in a very specific box, even with advancements in rights and freedoms. I hope that my work connects with women on a level they feel is personal and attaches itself to a specific memory for them. For others, I hope my work is able to give them the space to take an extra moment to consider what the women in their lives have endured and continue to endure.
The US government has become both actively anti-intellectual and anti-female. As the atmosphere has changed, has your work changed? Have reactions to your work changed?
My work hasn’t necessarily changed as the government becomes more openly anti-intellectual and anti-female, but it has begun to feel more urgent. Because my practice is rooted in my own experiences and those of the women around me, I naturally pull from the climate we’re living in now. This