Mother Island

Two children and their mother are stranded on an imaginary island and set out to explore two parallel worlds: their own reenactment of the 15 months of pandemic lockdown set against the real-life reenactment of a 1960’s island shipwreck. The two worlds collide, and a magical layering of truth and fiction unfolds replete with a fantastical cardboard house, a boat on wheels, and years’ worth of drawings, sculptures and performances co-created by the artist and her children. In the world of Mother Island, the viewer traverses an intertextual landscape of complex and nuanced feelings about the isolation of motherhood, the creativity of surviving childhood, and the ethics of care for one another and the environment.

Rebecca Weisman is a US-based conceptual artist working at the intersection of moving image and sculpture. Her work explores nature, memory, reenactment, and the real, as well as the body and its messy relationship to the unconscious. She has twenty years of experience producing time-based installations and films, often in unlikely venues and locations (the Oregon desert, vacant urban buildings, a Vermont mountaintop, her own home) as well as for more traditional gallery settings. She has exhibited and screened work nationally and internationally, most recently Skin Ego, a solo film installation at Burlington City Arts and is currently a National Artist at A.I.R. Gallery. She has published articles on art and philosophy and has taught courses in video art, installation, and conceptual art. She lives and works in Vermont, USA.

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