Rebecca Chamberlain
“Take me to a place that gives you a sense, no matter how brief, of hope and calm.” This is the question artist and fashion designer Rebecca Chamberlain put to far-flung friends and acquaintances in private letters and social media postings. A query she used as an icebreaker a few years back when working with patients at a Dutch artists residency located inside a mental institution, her question is tailor made for our present era. Hope and calm are states we may yearn for more than ever, but it takes a certain artfulness to activate those memories while under global lockdown.
Though people are entirely absent, traces of kinship, fellow feeling, and family ties haunt Chamberlain’s elegant renderings of affective spaces. The effect is that of a missed encounter, as if the viewer has arrived minutes late, with the tea still warm inside the teacup and the ink not yet dry on the visitor’s notebook. As if providing proof of an opportunity missed, Chamberlain has embarked on a more practical exercise to fuse art and healing: mask making for local front line workers and her community using a palette based on requirements from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Colorful, inspiring, and eminently useful they make up protective gear that is both genuinely effective and guardedly optimistic.
— CVF, USFCAM
“When this pandemic started it was natural to look for moments of hope and calm for myself, my children—with my family, my friends…these moments varied as much as the people themselves.
“Several years ago I spent the summer with my husband and two young
children in a mental health institution in the Netherlands. I worked
with the patients there asking them what I thought was a universally
simple, even primal question: ‘Take me to a place that gives you a sense, no matter how brief, of hope and calm.’
“Once I had settled into life during quarantine, the question kept pressing at me as a way to viscerally connect to others. I ventured with the question on social media platforms. The response has been overwhelming with images and descriptions of places coming from all over the world. Deep connection with people, capturing a sort of ‘portrait’ of them through these images, has been my own sense of hope and calm.”
— Rebecca Chamberlain
Rebecca Chamberlain, Life During Wartime: Light, Air and Openness in 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Rebecca Chamberlain. Courtesy of Anna Schori.
About Rebecca Chamberlain
(Bryn Mawr, PA, 1970)
She lives and works between Brooklyn and Delancey, NY.
Rebecca Chamberlain has worked broadly across disciplines, from painting and performance to fashion design. Her paintings and drawings consider the boundaries of public and private spaces and the psychological and physical impact of architecture. Using materials such as lithography ink and ballpoint pen in unusual ways, Chamberlain’s paintings of Modernist architecture call attention to a humanist approach to design and its effect on the way we experience spaces. She has performed at the Hirschhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). Her work has been exhibited at Dodge Gallery, 303 Gallery, and Knoedler Project Space in New York; Judi Rotenberg Gallery (Boston, MA); and at Leyendecker Gallery (Canary Islands, Spain), among other venues. She has been a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Grant and a NYFA Fellowship for Painting. Chamberlain's work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The Boston Globe, Flash Art, and Tema Celeste. Following a residency at Het Vijfde Seizoen (an artist residency program at a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands), Chamberlain became an Artist Ambassador for the Beautiful Distress Foundation Artist Residency at Kings County Hospital (Brooklyn, NY.)
Artist website: rebecca-chamberlain.com
Artist Instagram: @rebeccachamberlainstudio
Book link: Ballpoint Art