American Nightmare/ American Dream:
Interview with Rachael Jablo
by Courtney Simchak
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Rachael Jablo’s artwork is expansive, including explorations of neighborhood spaces, migraines, and illness and botanicals. While the subject matter of her work may vary, Jablo’s unrelenting eye and thoughtful deliberation is a constant in her work. In her most recent series, “American Nightmare/ American Dream,” Jablo uses photo collage to arrange fragments of photographs into delicate but vivid images of firearms and the impressions—physical and conceptual—they may leave behind.
Jablo’s lace contemplations leave the viewer with the complicated and imperatively important question—what does our country’s gun violence contribute to our larger American cultural perception and, more importantly, to individual lives?
Read our interview with Jablo to learn what prompted her recent series, what it’s like to live in Berlin as an American, how she developed her photo collage process, and how she has evolved as an artist and photographer.
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COURTNEY SIMCHAK: Your series, “American nightmare/ American dream” is a very poignant and direct look at the complexities behind guns and gun violence, specifically in the United States. Can you talk more about what started the project and how your relationship to the work may or may not have changed since making them?
RACHAEL JABLO: When I moved to Berlin in 2015 and started interacting with people around me, I found everyone asking about the rampant gun violence in the States. When I was younger and traveled abroad, the things I would be asked about would often be Hollywood/TV cultural touchstones, Disneyland/world, and major cities. Today, people tell me that they are afraid of going to the US because they are afraid of getting shot. Our current cultural legacy is one of violence.
Every time I would read about a different mass shooting, it seemed that the shooter had a background of misogyny. Diving further into that and seeing how deeply rooted gun violence is in misogyny, it made so much sense to have my guns be made of lace. Lace is traditionally made by and for women. It’s something that once upon a time was part of a “hope chest.” I take the imagery of our hopes and dreams and twist it around, like women’s hopes and dreams get twisted by violent men.
Working in the darkroom is meditation for me. The photogram collages were something I’d had in the back of my mind for years, an expansion of a project I did years ago … I was attracted to the idea of creating all of the elements of collage, of slowing it down.
SIMCHAK: As an American who has lived in Berlin for several years now, do you find your experience as an American has changed? How has living abroad affected your art practice?
JABLO: So much has happened in the past three years that it’s hard to quantify. I think as artists, we are naturally observers of culture. Here in Germany, I feel incredibly American and find myself in a weird position of explaining my country to people, and then I return to the States and I feel out of place. It’s a strange feeling of being in between cultures that I think is fairly common to new immigrants.
In terms of my art practice, I don’t think “American nightmare/American dream” could have been made while I was living in the States. I was of course aware of the problems we were having with guns, but it took having a bit of distance to get me into the studio and make work about it.
SIMCHAK: Your collages have a bodily air about them—they seem both flowers and flesh simultaneously. The tenderness in which the collages are cut and methodically placed is juxtaposed with both the violence of the gun’s shape and the bloody, fleshy tone of the flowering elements of each piece. The result is both beautiful and jarring. Your series before this one was inspired by Anna Atkins’ botanical art and research, I believe, where you used a similar technique. What was it like to go from your work in that series to the “American nightmare” series?
JABLO: The transition from one body of work wasn’t as discrete as it seems. I actually spent a few listless months working transitionally, using both the lace and flowers together, trying to figure out what to do next. I worked more with the lace alone and saw how visceral of a material it could be, and that led me to the guns. And now, I go back and forth between them. I just spent a few months making small (12×16”) photogram collages, and then in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been making an accordion book arsenal in response to the Parkland shooting. The guns get a bit mentally and emotionally exhausting at times, but I honestly don’t think I can stop doing them while the US has such a massive problem, which is to say, I’ll probably be making them the rest of my life.
Diving further into that and seeing how deeply rooted gun violence is in misogyny, it made so much sense to have my guns be made of lace. Lace is traditionally made by and for women. It’s something that once upon a time was part of a “hope chest.” I take the imagery of our hopes and dreams and twist it around, like women’s hopes and dreams get twisted by violent men.
SIMCHAK: Have you always been an artist and interested in art? What drew you to the choice as a career?
JABLO: When I was a small child, my mother was a photographer. My earliest memories are of being in her makeshift closet darkroom with her. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things, and I started my photography practice in earnest around age 15. I haven’t stopped since. I can’t imagine doing anything other than making art. It’s like my second language.
SIMCHAK: Your work originally began in photography, but your most recent work has turned to large installation sized collage. What inspired the exploration into collage?
JABLO: I’ve always been an analog photographer and love the slowness or working in the darkroom. Working in the darkroom is meditation for me. The photogram collages were something I’d had in the back of my mind for years, an expansion of a project I did years ago, a floor installation made of cut-out photograms. This work just took it one step further, into collage. I was attracted to the idea of creating all of the elements of collage, of slowing it down.
The project had been in the back of my mind for years, but I’d been busy working on other projects, like my book (“My days of losing words”), so when I moved to Berlin, I finally had the time and space available to me to give it the attention it deserved. Now, I’m three years in, and it keeps on evolving.
Today, people tell me that they are afraid of going to the US because they are afraid of getting shot. Our current cultural legacy is one of violence.
SIMCHAK: You’ve also tackled the difficult experiences of mental health and illness, in your work “My days of losing words,” when you document your personal experience with migraines and your recovery. What drew you to share and to document such an intimate and difficult journey? What was your personal outcome of doing that work? How do you think it was received by others?
JABLO: There was no possible way I couldn’t make “My days of losing words.” When I became sick with chronic migraine, I was stuck for weeks, and sometimes months, at a time in my apartment, only leaving for doctors’ appointments and work when I could make it there. The pain I had was blinding. I had been a landscape photographer for years, and all of the sudden I was no longer able to work in the same manner. As an artist, you find a way to make work, and in those circumstances, I shot what was happening to me. I had no idea if it would be compelling to anyone but me, but for me it was a light in the tunnel. After the fact, in presenting the work to the world in book form, I realized that there are so many people like me, stuck in dark rooms throughout the world, and I heard from a lot of them. It helped me politicize my illness—realizing how little money migraine and other headache disorders get from NIH despite being some of the most disabling illnesses you can have—it got me off my ass and to Washington to lobby Congress with other headache patients and medical workers in order to try to better our situation. I’ve heard from migraineurs all over the world who were touched by my book, and I’m incredibly proud of that.
Lastly, I feel I need to add that migraine is most definitely not an issue of mental health, though depression and mental health are problems that pop up with almost any chronic illness. The issues that my book dealt with were more about memory and language problems that were caused by both the migraine and were side effects of one of the drugs prescribed to me.
Rachael Jablo is an artist currently working and living in Berlin. Her work has most recently been exhibited at the Rasche Ripken Galerie in Berlin, Germany, and The Collagistas Festival in Italy. Jablo’s work includes her acclaimed 2013 monograph, “My days of losing words.”