Spotlight Artist

Rachel Borenstein

Pacific Coast
Artist profile photo

Cosmic Zoom

Crinkled gray textured paper with dark shading and light creases.

Micron on paper

Elegy for Crab

Graphite drawing of crumpled paper and textured surfaces on a shaded tabletop.

Micron on paper

Votive Foot

Charcoal drawing of a crumpled paper and rocks on a textured surface.

Micron on paper

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 For the past several years, I have been making work based on observations inside my Highland Park studio and the surrounding landscape, shifting between working close up and from a great distance. In my drawing and painting practice, I create layered images that chart history, memory, and erasure over time. I am drawn towards imagery that depicts processes of decomposition and decay, such as dying plants and fading photographs. Even when I am working from objects in my studio, I am influenced by the scenery around me where I work. The long hot summers and brief periods of growth, dry crumbling hillsides, and vast folding hills are reflected back through the precarious nature of my subject matter. These objects and landscapes mirror the ways in which the natural environment balances the processes of life and death. In essence, my art seeks to reach across the divide between the intimate and the vast, the tangible and the abstract.

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