April Artist of the Month:
Elaine Kaufmann

Elaine Kaufmann brings together appropriated images and text to direct her sharply witty analysis of global social disparities.  She inventively questions the world around her, inviting viewers to consider alternate realities outside of our comfortable existence.

In the “International Design” series, Kaufmann unites appropriated text and layout from elite décor magazines with images of Third World housing. In one, the message “Paradise Bought” prominently frames images of densely packed shacks in Mumbai, India. In another, “Distinctive Bathrooms” and “Exotic” align with a view inside of a dilapidated outhouse. Each is meticulously drawn with a single style of pencil on paper, requiring 50 to 60 hours of work. Kaufmann crops the images so that viewing them together feels like sifting through a selection of magazine clippings that someone has compiled to educate you about the problematic portrayals of society in the media.

In her artist book Minivan, Kaufmann has re-conceived the minivan as a designer-luxury item.  Acting simultaneously as marketing executive and renegade social analyst, she critiques the positioning minivans and their owners as hip and adventurous. Her dramatic images of the Voyager, the Wonderwagon, and their compatriots are accompanied with haikus to complete the message such as: “Check out those sleek lines—a wedge flies through space and time, what more could one want?”  The images and haikus are sewn together into an artist book, making it nearly impossible to communicate the message to either a young-hipster or soccer-mom audience, and creating a humorous take on modernity for everyone else.

Kaufmann is currently working on a project that expands upon her previous themes by uniting text from contemporary commercial advertising with images from classic Russian propaganda posters. The two communicate together surprisingly well, and will become even more impressive large-scale.

Elaine Kaufmann received an M.F.A. in Painting from Hunter College in 2004, and an M.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University in 1998. She participated in the fall 2006 Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Kaufmann is a founding member of the Brainstormers, a collective of four artists founded in March, 2005 that demands discussion of gender inequity and power structure in the art world through performance. Brainstormers has performed at P.S. 1, the Armory Show, and the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum among other venues.

- Johanna Taylor

Paradise Bought, 2006, from the “Industrial Design” series, pencil on paper, detail.

My recent work focuses on examining how our notions of what is central or peripheral are constructed, particularly those connected to space and class. I frequently juxtapose text and image in ways that call into question our assumptions about what is valued and why.

International Design was inspired by an interest in how the media conveys a distorted view of home, one that promotes the agenda of the rich. This project began after I read several books about the billion people who live in slums around the world at the same time that I was seeing articles in the New York Times like “The Allure of Buying Your Own Private Island.” I wanted to place this extreme poverty and extreme wealth in relationship to each other, forcing a connect ion that is usually ignored or even denied.

For each drawing in the series, I appropriate text from newspaper and magazine articles about homes. In place of the original luxurious image, I substitute an image of housing in the Third World. The text does describe the image but in a way that the article’s focus on wealth is revealed as problematic and the underlying desire for such lavishness is no longer inevitable. I am particularly interested in revealing how newspapers and magazines promote wealth and poverty as natural and unproblematic.

As with International Design, the project, Minivan, seeks to reverse the value that is typically ascribed to cultural phenomena, in this case, the much-maligned vehicle associated with dull suburban life. These images re-imagine the minivan as the vehicle of choice for young hipsters. This project culminated in an artist book, with each image accompanied by a haiku that celebrates their design and cultural import. An example haiku: “’Avante-garde!’ speaks this/space for mind expansion and/double cup holders.”