In her second exhibition with Carter Burden Gallery Andrea Lilienthal presents dresses sewn from newsprint and thread in Small Disturbances. The forms highlight the images printed in the New York Times and call attention to life and nature under stress in many of the places the photographers focus their cameras on. Lilienthal seeks to transform images of sorrow and misery into beauty.
She does so with the most transient material we throw away every day and gives it a new life. The dress patterns themselves elicit memories and associations of an earlier time when immigration, deforestation, and climate change were not on the front pages. She states, “The grief depicted here contrasts with the innocence of the form to elicit outrage, empathy, and hope. We look so fleetingly at these images as the newspapers are discarded. Here we can contemplate the photographs and find meaning. The dresses serve as memorials to the lives depicted and to the photographers who captured their stories.”
Andrea Lilienthal is a visual artist who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has had a one-person yearlong outdoor site-specific installation at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, entitled Six Ladders in 2013-14. In 2015 her outdoor sculptural installation TipTop began its yearlong run at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, Vermont. Most recently she has shown at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, a two-person show at Mountain Fold Gallery in New York City, and a group show at Worcester State College. She has curated numerous exhibitions and has been asked to curate shows at the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn and The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY. She taught art and art history for ten years at Pace University and Fairleigh Dickinson University.