Elisabeth Tonnard nominated the artist Madeline Djerejian:
Madeline maintains a lively practice creating suggestive works that are often based on image-text connections. To me it is interesting that her projects are of a conceptual nature while also hard to pin down, they constantly invite further exploration because they cannot be captured into one-liners. The works are never obvious. It is the oeuvre of a thinker. She uses unexpected combinations, such as in 'decima campesina' a video in which text from a love letter is juxtaposed with photographs taken by her father in Kuwait in June of 1991. Everywhere the viewer is left to form his or her own conclusions, for instance in the really exemplary project (also because it is small and unassuming, and thus rare) 'Wordsworth at Arlington' which is simply about a text encountered on a gravestone of a soldier who died in recent battle. The juxtaposition here is to the Wordsworth poem that the text came from. Such loving, caring works the world could use more of.
Madeline also runs the salon 1@111 together with Rachel Gugelberger. I was happy to be a guest speaker for it in 2014. Artists, writers and curators are invited to share their work process in an intimate setting. It continues an old humanistic tradition right in the heart of NYC.
Work by Madeline Djerejian:
The Last of Beirut weaves together text and image to construct a contemplative vision of displacement and loss on the eve of civil war in Lebanon in 1975.