Artwork Description
Meridel Rubenstein – Bed on Fire
Dimensions: 24 x 20″ finished size
Year: 1987
Medium: Cibachrome
Meridel Rubenstein’s Bed on Fire uses “Fire” as a poetic metaphor for intense feeling – it is a complex signifier underscoring external and internal forces such as desire, fury, greed, sin and passion. It also represents the energy of courageously stepping towards transformation. In a feminist perspective, the burning of the bed presents a refusal to continue a patriarchal narrative.
-Shastyn Blomquist
American artist Meridel Rubenstein began her professional career in the early 1970s, evolving from photographer of single photographic images to an artist of extended works, multi-media installations, and social practice.
Upon turning 70 in 2018, Rubenstein celebrated with four large public exhibitions spanning the past 25 years of her practice. This includes works from her atomic series Critical Mass, as well as her installation Oppenheimer’s Chair, which was commissioned for the first Site Santa Fe International Biennial in 1995 (on the anniversary of the initial atomic test at Trinity), as well as her newest work, a three-part series titled Eden Turned on Its Side. The latter focuses on intersections of nature and culture in relationship to ecological and social imbalance, beginning with Photosynthesis on a farm in Vermont, expanding globally to the Volcanoes of the Ring of Fire in Indonesia, and finally to the site of the original Garden of Eden in Iraq.