Donna Bassin "My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair.Messiah.9"

Donna Bassin "My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair.Messiah.9" 2021

Photography, Archival pigment print, Rice paper, Embroidery thread, Framed
Dimensions: Artwork 18 x 24 in, Frame 22 x 28 in 
Limited Edition of 3
Signed on Recto, includes certificate of authenticity.

Donna Bassin is a photo-based artist, filmmaker, clinical psychologist, and published author. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she now resides in New Jersey. Her long-term projects engage with painful aspects of contemporary life, including post-traumatic stress, racism, social injustice, and the destruction of our environment. These efforts have led to two award-winning feature-length documentaries, museum and gallery exhibitions, and publications in numerous art and culture magazines—such as Tricycle, Fotonostrum, Grazia, Borderline Press’ Facsimile, Lens Magazine, FLOAT Magazine, LandEscape Art Review, Dodho Magazine, The Hand Magazine, Analog Forever, Vostok Magazine, and Overlapse’s Stir the Pot—as well as public installations, book covers, and a billboard. The Afterlife of Dolls, a solo exhibition at Montclair Art Museum, was featured on PBS's State of the Arts. Her work is held in private and museum collections. Bassin has received a 2024 Puffin Foundation Artist Grant and a 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship for photography. She was recognized as one of the Top 50 Photographers for Critical Mass 2022 and a finalist in Critical Mass 2023 and 2024. Selections from her current Environmental Melancholia series have been exhibited in New York City at the Carter Burden Gallery and Ceres Gallery. The series will be shown in its entirety as part of an upcoming solo exhibition, Donna Bassin: Portraits of the Precarious Earth, from January 29, 2025, until May 5, 2025, at the Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island.

“What is a portrait, if not an acknowledgment of a human encounter: an opportunity to imagine the life of another? During the years following the 2016 presidential election, I initiated portrait collaborations between those who – through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, and/or disability – felt they had been deemed invisible and un-entitled to their place in this American moment. I asked my sitters to turn themselves “inside out” and to use pose, gesture, and gaze to express their emotional truths, visually assert their identity, become their witnesses, and invite the viewer to a visceral face-to-face encounter with their humanity. While the American flag has become a complicated symbol, some sitters reclaimed and reimagined it to express their defiance and respectful hope for the return of democracy. As a series, the shared black velvet background and chiaroscuro lighting join each individual in the collective. Channeling the injuries brought on by the pandemic and the further erosion of our democracy, I ripped the original portraits to create “wounds” reflecting individual and collective trauma. Inspired by the Japanese practice of kintsugi, an ancient craft that repairs broken pottery with gold lacquer, I restored the torn portraits with stitching and golden rice paper. Metaphorically, kintsugi honors the acceptance of injury as part of the object's life and gives material form to the history of experience. We acknowledge and pay attention to our violent past in the future, so we don't repeat it. These injuries are our losses to be witnessed, mourned, and transformed into change.” - Donna Bassin

For more information on the exhibition visit our website.