Gabrielle Egnater
“Who will the next memorial be for?” (2020)
wood, fabric, PLA, heat transfer
4 x 3 x 3 in. each flag
$55 per flag
“My recent work looks at the ideal of a monument/memorial/marker in the United States. Being raised in the Jewish community, I was consistently exposed to the un-marked, column, and gridded aesthetic of holocaust memorials. These stark aesthetics combined with the contentious history of memorials in the United States seems to lack or conflict with memory.
Memorials have built-in contradictions. If an object is meant to memorialize an incomprehensible loss, how do you represent the incomprehensible? If there are too many names to list, how do you represent them? If you could never represent the loss, why try in the first place? If everyone has a different experience, how can you create a single space to memorialize? If the monument acts as an attempted closure, is that dismissive of the event? Despite the contradictions, we continue to create memorials.
Maybe the solution is to make more/ make less/ make someone else choose. My work questions the ideal of a monument/memorial/maker with ephemeral objects, home shrines, miniatures, and interactive objects.”
© Gabrielle Egnater