ABOUT — KEREN OXMAN

Keren Oxman is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Oxman holds a B.A. with Honors from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and an M.A. with Honors from the Royal College of Art in London where she was a Clore Fellow. Her work experimentally speculates on the intersection of art and anthropology, the temporal artifact and the exploration of cultural otherness. Oxman is the recipient of the Rockefeller grant in New York. Her recent Artist Residencies include Eyebeam Atelier, The Cooper Union school of Art and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Oxman's work has been exhibited worldwide in Paris, New York and London.

Oxman’s work operates as a form of anthropological research in which the artist functions as a collector scavenging and piecing together distant documents alongside cultural relics and contemporary artifacts all taken from the infinite pool of existing junk space. These aggregations, that draw from the aesthetics of traditional masks and artifacts, create a complex mosaic of mash-up and establish the visual presence of the creaturely. This creates a suggested and suggestive race that ranges from the foreign to the familiar, from the visceral to the external, and relates to a cross-cultural, post-colonial world.

Painting offers Oxman a field for optical sensations and conceptual connections; the canvas becomes a “Contact Zone''. "Arts of the Contact Zone", is a term introduced by Mary Louise Pratt, “The space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations”. “The term refers to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”. Oxman works in an additive approach, applying layers of paint over time. Blocks of color merge and clash simultaneously, and form an amalgamation of abstract narrations.