The development of a body of work from creation to implementation: Rewriting History
Elizabeth Kleinveld, a self-taught artist and freelance writer from in New Orleans, was in 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina still haunted by the images that she had seen on TV in the week after hurricane Katrina had devastated her hometown. These images, which showed people (90% of them African American) forced to camp out in the Superdome for days, laid bear the harsh reality of her city, that the poorest had been given no chance. Indeed, these post-Katrina images depicted the harsh reality of a country divided between the haves and the have nots. And it was precisely these images from the Superdome, which she couldn’t get out of her mind, even three years after the storm, precisely because the inequality that was exposed during the evacuation had only gotten worse.
So Kleinveld felt compelled to use her work as a way to point out how our stereotypes can lead to such injustices, that whether conscious or not, they can lead to prejudice and discrimination.
How did she do this? By showing what we take for granted and turning it upside down. First, she thought of an image that exuded the same feelings of helplessness and loss that she felt when seeing the people stuck in the Superdome. The one image that had haunted her from her youth came from a scene in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a scene in which Meryl Streep loomed before the edge of the water, looking into the abyss.
During 2008, Kleinveld was working on a book and international traveling exhibition with eleven photographers from Louisiana, entitled Before During After: Louisiana Photographers Respond to Hurricane Katrina. The book was to mark the fifth anniversary of Katrina and was published by University of New Orleans Press in 2010; the exhibition, sponsored by the Louisiana State Museum and DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), was how she got to know fellow photographer, E Paul Julien.
For Julien, Katrina had wrought devastating effects. He had lost his darkroom and studio as well as most of the work from the ten years preceding Katrina (1995-2005). He also experienced first hand the hardship of coming back to a totally different city, a city in which the rent was three times what it had been, a city which had overnight become unaffordable to a large percentage of the population. Similarly to Kleinveld, Julien tried to deal with his experiences through art and had started a new body of work while he was exiled from New Orleans. Not having his photography equiptment at hand, this new body of work was based on painting and mixed media collage.
During the Before During After project, it became clear that both Julien and Kleinveld wanted to work together to do something about the inequality they saw, using their work as a way to bring up a discussion about the consequences of stereotypes.
And so Kleinveld and Julien began work on this series of portraits, a series that takes iconic works of art including paintings, photographs and movies and remakes them with a twist. Kleinveld decided to use the image from the The French Lieutenant’s Woman as the starting point for the new series, and set off to research the concept behind the book. It was at this point that she discovered that the author, John Fowles, took his inspired from the work of Claire de Duras, a French writer who wrote the novella, Ourika, in 1824. Ourika, based on a true story that took place around the time of the French Revolution, was one of the first times in which a writer had tried to put themselves in the shoes of someone from another race or culture.
The story explains how Ourika was rescued from the slave trade and placed under Mme de B’s care. Mme de B, a French aristocrat whose uncle had rescued Ourika, treated her like a member of the family and until Ourika was fifteen she was very happy. However soon after her “debut” she overhears Mme de B and a friend speaking of Ourika’s unfortunate situation, for while Ourika is as accomplished as a young white lady of aristocratic birth would be, she will never have suitors because of the color of her skin. When Ourika “realizes the true nature of her situation,” she is crushed and feels utterly forsaken by society and those closest to her. This devastation causes her to dies an untimely death at the age of seventeen. The main aim in remaking Ourika and taking iconic imagery is to show that we all have racial, sexual, and cultural stereotypes, which, if gone unchecked can lead to prejudice.
In order to work on this series and to better illustrate this link, Kleinveld and Julien have created the artist name, E2. In addition, they’re utilizing other symbols, like a coat of arms, which traditionally stands for the landed gentry and nobility, a part of society to which both Kleinveld and Julien could never have aspired given their roots (Jewish and African). In so doing, E2 once again turns convention upside down, giving symbols and icons new meaning. Thus far, the series consists of work based on famous Flemish and Dutch masters (Vermeer, van Haecht, Brueghel de Jonge), renowned Italian and Spanish painters (Titian, Velázquez and Goya), famous French painters (Ingres, Chasseriau, David, Manet and the Fountainbleau School), as well as work from Gone with the Wind and other movies and photographs.