June 2021 Artist in Residency: Rachel Fein-Smolinski
We’re super excited to welcome residents back into the lab after a year long hiatus. Up first is the amazing Rachel Fein-Smolinski. We sat down with them to discuss their practice, influences, and what they hope to accomplish during their month long residency.
Q & A
How does your cultural identity influence your work?
I’ve always had this idea that as a Jewish-American person being neurotic was like a given, that it was a trait that I needed to sublimate intellectually if I wanted to be an influential person in the world (think Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Magnus Hirschfeld, Claude Cahun, Susan Sontag etc.) The archetype of Jewish intellectualism has played a significant role in the formation of my identity, and it is wrapped up in the socio-historical implications of being a queer person with a maternal line of mental illness. The way that this archetype of intellect has played out in post-modern clinical treatment methodologies and informs social understandings of what constitutes a painful experience informs the way that I make work.
The false dichotomy of Intellect vs emotion has been historically weaponized to promote fascist ideologies and is an often repeated pattern. A contemporary example would be the role of anti-intellectualism in the MAGA campaign. And historically, during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 30s the binary of intellect vs emotion was a rally cry that used bodily terminology (blood was code for Aryan nationalism) to privilege nationalism over intellectualism (think Goebbel’s speech in Berlin in the 1933 book burnings declaring an end to “Jewish intellectualism.”)
Anyways, on a more topical pop cultural note, I think about the role that Bebe Neuwirth played on the 90s spinoff sitcom, Frasier. She was Frasier’s ex-wife and recurrent female love-interest, Lilith, named after prominent figure in Jewish mythology, Adam’s first wife banished from Eden when she refused to lay beneath him, and I don’t think that her characterization as a heartless, analytical psychiatrist is incidental in its relationship with her Jewish identity. I find it interesting that Frasier is characterized as a decidedly Freudian psychoanalyst, a sect of psychoanalysis suffuse with Jewish history yet he and his brother are so unbelievably WASP-y, and their father Eddie (kidding, Eddie is the dog, the dad’s name is Martin) is presented as the epitome of late 20th century anti-intellect. This is a bit of a digression but these identity-relations in this show represent the complex entanglement of contemporary Jewish identity and post-modern intellectualism that influences my work in a significant way.
You work in a variety of media. How do you decide which medium will be the best choice for a given project (i.e. photography over video)?
I think about this a lot, especially after spending my first two years out of grad school running a service lab where I encountered a lot of understandable angst surrounding high production quality, and rather than view it as a result of individual artists’ particularities I started to look at certain material anxieties as a response to fine-art photography market conventions. It really upset me because I think that there is a lot of classism, ableism, and economically inaccessible expectations embedded in those market conventions. This informs the way that I choose materials.
Conceptual relevance is really important, so all of my material choices are borrowed from the medical field, (e.g. dye-sublimation prints on ceramic tiles, the perfect architectural elements of the “wet lab,” suture threads for binding and mounting, inkjet prints on cotton to feel like hospital sheets, color schemes chosen from paint companies’ medical industrial color story suggestions, microscopy etc.) I always think, when I start out with something; “What type of image/object making am I referencing right now?” and then try to make a fantasy version of it. Most recently, I have these audio recordings from the 60s and 70s of doctors practicing clinical hypnosis on patients and using this for video and/or time based performance has been really exciting. So, in a show that I had in Fall of 2019 called This Woman has ISSUES! at a new space called the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art a classically trained ballerina turned pole dancer, and close friend, Evan Vafai, choreographed a pole dance in response to a recording of a doctor practicing clinical hypnosis. Here is an excerpt from that performance: https://vimeo.com/376293699
Tell us more about your project Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones.
This title is from a biology textbook of the same name, by Haig H Najarian, about invertebrate sexuality. The metaphorical implications of how spineless creatures fuck is a microcosm of what I want this work to do.
I incorporate imagery from medical archives using emotional qualities as search criteria, and the linguistic function of corporeal metaphors is something that is often explored through this work (e.g. spineless = coward, heartless = without emotion, brainy = smart, gut = locale of intuition etc.) I have had issues with my spine since I was hit by a car when I was a child and my neck injury never seemed to heal, so trying to find a diagnosis for chronic pain that turned out to be a genetic disorder is partial autobiographical root of this work. The project has taken form in a series of installations using imagery from medical archives, like Archives and Special Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Health Sciences Library, where I was fortunate enough to install a show in Fall of 2019, tableaux, and clinical photographs with redacted identifying information from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at University of Rochester Medical Center’s Edward G. Miner Library. I basically wanted to become a sci-fi author using visual material.
What will you be working on during your residency at LATITUDE?
As a newly transplanted Illinois resident, I’d like to one: use some time to meet with folks in the Chicago health humanities community to learn about regional medical history, and continue work on a video project with Simulated Patients as actors. Two: as a lot of my material/inspiration comes from medical institutional archives, meeting with folks at local medical archives to see what I can find. Three: to print and bind a set of pseudo textbooks organized according to body systems to translate Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones into a book format. And four: making some big fabric prints, I’ve been using Cotton Sateen, but I want to try Cotton Duck Cloth because it seems a little more gauze-y and learn a new image transfer process.
You’ve said that you’re interested in examining the masculine archetypes of the science fiction genre. What is it about these archetypes that interests you?
This is what first got me into this project. I was feeling really powerless in my life, in chronic pain with no diagnosis yet, and entering my third year of grad school, I had spent the last few years working for and emulating a lot of cis-male mentors in the photography community and was feeling hopeless at the prospect that my art career was just going to be me trying to be impressive to please men that I was intimidated by. I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time as an adult and was struck by Shelley’s gender-choice for Dr. Fankenstein, but not just that, how masculine and feminine conventions read a lot like the binary of hard and soft sciences, and in this way different types of knowledge have historically been gendered. It is curious that the archetype of the “mad” scientist in popular representations (think Rick and Morty and the show’s fan-base of man-splainers) has been predominantly white-cis-male, yet neurotic mental illness is a diagnostic umbrella that has been used historically to subjugate people of marginalized gender identities. Since the project began though, I’ve learned that viewing this archetype as monolithic has foreclosed a more nuanced understanding of how sexual politics, gender dynamics, and race relations have formed intersecting networks of knowledge within biomedical history.
What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to that we should check out?
As an avid subscriber to the ABCs of media (Always Be Consuming, that’s what the ABC TV network stands for, right?) I only ever want to be talking about what I’m watching, reading, or listening to. I just read Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals which is a life-altering publication made up of mostly diary entries detailing Lorde’s experience living with breast cancer, and I was pointed to this from Anne Boyer’s 2019 book, The Undying which incorporates first person illness and serious research into the history of the illness narrative; totally perfect and beautiful.
I love Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Re. podcasts, The Bright Sessions is this impeccable sci-fi audio drama created by Lauren Shippen that I really recommend, it’s like X-Men, but with more openly queer characters, and from the perspective of their therapist, and Urgent Care with Joel Kim Booster and Mitra Jouhari. I watched all of Tuca and Bertie in one tear-filled sitting, Lisa Hanawalt’s animation is fricking incredible. Lastly, documentation of Barbara Hammer’s 2018 lecture at the Whitney, The Art of Dying or (Palliative Artmaking in the Age of Anxiety) is on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeoAx9dZkI) and is incredibly moving and I’ve been returning to it a lot this past year. Oh, and last-lastly, really loving Carmen Maria Machado lately.
See more of Rachel’s work here