The Abrons Arts Center is pleased to present artist Susan C. Dessel’s first Manhattan solo show, entitled still lives. This exhibition of the artist’s new work in the Culpeper Gallery includes still lives a mixed-media installation and american samplers, series 3 (the chicken chronicles), a suite of 14 drawings. Dessel has again used death and memory as the starting points for her conceptual work. still lives is a celebration of the lives of the women among the earliest Jewish settlers who arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1654. The installation creates a visual scape to communicate and represent the essence of the lives of women who history has largely forgotten by giving voice to these women and their female descendants buried in three Manhattan cemeteries (through the mid 1800s).

Dessel has created objects that combine beauty and functionality to represent each woman. These women were refugees and immigrants. Exiled or self-selected, all sought better lives for themselves and their families regardless of the unknown, the uncertainty, and the daily hardships that faced them in Nieuw Amsterdam/New York. Their new lives were complex: marked by civil law and freedom, by the pulls of tradition and the allures of choice.

Dessel chose to make toothbrushes and their precursors as objects representative of the dignity of each woman as she strove to keep body and soul together in a strange environment. Each skillfully hand made brush (carved cow bones and horse hair bristles) is symbolic of the women’s struggle to take care of the home and the family and hold on to a sense of self while caring for others’ needs and wants. The artist’s use of multiples also references the commonality of some aspects of the women’s lives while the differences among the named pieces symbolize their individuality.

Inherent in the artist’s work is the connection among immigrants’ issues and concerns over the centuries. Dessel selected food as the visual images for the drawings, for the kitchen was the domain of these women without exception. With a dose of humor the artist addresses serious issues faced by immigrants still today, including: minority/majority relationships, the pull of tradition and the enticement of the unknown, freedom to choose through assimilation and intermarriage, and issues of borders and boundaries.

Dessel continues to engage the viewer with sometimes discomforting societal issues, highlighted here by the African chew sticks, while letting viewers’ individual perspectives influence how each connects to the work and understands its relevance past, present and future.