Bøker av Sandy Bleifer

The folding screen format in Sandy Bleifer's art is a means of representing Time and Space in a static medium.The folds encompass space and add a greater three-dimensionality to textured surfaces. Folding also enables the work to stand independently as sculptural objects. This enhances the “realism” of images such as mountains and clouds.The folding screen, as an articulated surface for an image, calls upon the viewer to experience the image linearly, rather than simultaneously as one does in confronting a painting in the conventional rectangular format. This approximates the experience of viewing dance or theater as well as music as a revelation of evolving meaning. Reading left to right, the viewer enters a work in the screen format by coming in at the beginning – at a seminal idea - and experiences a progression in the time it takes to move along to the right. The screen format also enables the representation of the passage of time on a given subject (e.g. gradual change of lighting from day to night) and a sequence of juxtapositions of images on facing pages. 

The figure in flight conjures up a familiar female archetype – an angel - an arbiter between human suffering and transcendence. The use of the female figure – long a staple of Western artistic iconography – may be interpreted in a contemporary context of women’s issues or as a matriarchal figure embodying the world’s suffering. The “Shrine of the Angels” series utilizes color photo Xerox printouts of the source image for the Angels, several incorporating a lighting element and on a scale that can collectively be installed as a shrine.These life-size female figures gesturing upward in supplication depict a range of human injuries that we endure. They have taken on a religious connotation when installed in churches and function as transcendence and closure in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Project when the artist has included them in that project.

Self portraits and body casts of dancers/costumes in handmade paper. These works are part of a long tradition of portraiture, artist self portraits and death masks in art history.The “life casts” of the artists’ face and body merge self-portraiture and gestural use of sheets of paper with the figure exerting its presence. The "Circus Costumes” were commissioned for a dance performance at Santa Monica College in 1989. The cast paper sculptures were Velcroed to the leotards of the dancers and serve as extensions of their bodies into portions of their costumes. They become metaphors for the dichotomy between our jobs/functions and our inner lives. At the end of the performance, the dancers remove their costumes, exerting their independence from the demands on their lives. 

Photographs of the Venice Walkstreets and residents' commentary as the Venice community, led by artist and activist Sandy Bleifer, strove (successfully) to retain the configuration of these neighborhoods and to protect them in city planning policies as historic and cultural assets.

The sequence of these photographs takes you on a walking tour from the Historic Core to Bunker Hill and down the Bunker Hill Steps to the Central Business District thereby connecting old and new downtown. The journey creates a visual narrative drawn from an inventory of architectural and cultural assets captured at a turning point in the 1990s.