David Kassan combines live interviews with painting to create vivid testimony on view in a new USC Fisher Museum and Shoah Foundation exhibition.
from survivors of nine genocides globally. That includes the Holocaust as well as the 1915 Armenian genocide, the 1975 Cambodian genocide and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
“We’re in a place I never thought that we would be again,” Smith says. “But because of our archive, we can shine a light on that, provide pathways to counter it and to educate and illuminate. If ever there’s a time that the Shoah Foundation is needed, it’s right now.”Advertisement “Being in their living rooms and getting to know them — it soaks into the painting, it’s a more empathetic eye,” Kassan says. “Paintings are vessels. I want the works to be a history of their lives in layered paint. Because it takes me layers of process — months and years — to do them.”
“What David does, in terms of the works themselves, is: He reaches out for technique into distant memory. You can almost feel the Dutch artists, the old ways of incredible traditional realism at his foundation. But his subjects are very much of the now — their dignity now, their pride now. They’re not victims.”
since died. In 2017 Ojai painter John Nava introduced Kassan to Smith and Holo. They were so taken with what Kassan was doing that they raised money to create what’s now been a two-year artist-in-residence position so that he could complete the project. “Facing Survival” will be Kassan’s first solo museum exhibition.
Visitors can click on an accompanying screen to access brief, or extended, text transcripts of their testimonies.
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