Rubenstein’s powerful images demonstrate the artist’s strong sense of deep time, elementalism and an earnest kinship with fellow dwellers of this Planet. In this gorgeous publication her carefully composed, serialised photographic works are presented with extraordinary clarity. Each copy is personally and proudly signed by Meridel herself. — Staff Pick / Jim
“Eden Turned on Its Side is a dazzling demonstration of the ways beauty (via inventive art and photography) can illuminate the earth’s most crucial issues, offering hope for a different world…” — Lucy R. Lippard
Award-winning American artist, Meridel Rubenstein (b.1948, Detroit) began her professional career in the early 1970s, evolving from photographer of single photographic images to an artist of extended works, multi-media installations, and social practice.
Throughout her career, she has created photographic artworks that engage the natural world and investigate humanity’s place within nature. Eden Turned on Its Side explores ecological and human processes across time that either reinforce or destroy the notion of ‘Eden’.
Focusing on poetic intersections of nature and culture in relation to ecological and social imbalance, the work consists of large-scale photographic images that tend toward immersive installation, as is characteristic of much of Rubenstein’s art.
It comprises three bodies of work created between 2009 and 2017: Photosynthesis, Volcano Cycle, and Eden in Iraq which respectively explore ecologies on the scales of human time, geological time, and mythical time.
Limited Artist’s Signed Edition published after the exhibition, Meridel Rubenstein: Eden Turned on Its Side at University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, USA (2 February – 16 June, 2018).
