Beth Krensky
ART Habens
when oppressive regimes come to power. The question is what do we, as artists, decide to do with our power? Do we work within the confines of the high art world? Do we take our work into the ever-expanding context of artmaking where every venue is open to interaction through art? What are the topics we address? What change do we strive to create through art? What type of bravery is needed for such acts?
Elements from environment are particularly recurrent in your imagery and they never plays the role of a mere background. Do you see a definite relationship between the notion of land and your work?
Benjamin Coleman, the Associate Curator of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Art wrote about my work’ s relationship to the land. He stated,“ With open-ended guidelines and a light footprint, Krensky offers a model for artist-driven environmental activism in the realm of lived practice.” writing and practice as a communitybased artist / educator, so it should not come as a surprise that I see the relationship between artists and the public sphere as inextricably linked. Artists wield tremendous power. It is no accident that artists are some of the first people to be detained, arrested, tortured and exiled
My work sanctifies the natural world and at times indicts those who have degraded it. I choose specific locations because of their history or significance. I perfomed Metaphysical Handcart on the Salt Flats— a wide expanse of whiteness and nothingness near the Great Salt Lake. As the cart makes its way through a landscape, everything it holds jiggles and moves. There are bronze and brass bells; a bowl( limned with a Hebrew blessing) filled with olive leaves; four dead birds cast in bronze. As they make their jingling and bumping sounds, I feel a sense of a narrow liminality, that the division between Heaven and Earth comes somehow aroused. I modeled this piece
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