Sheila Pinkel
Sheila Pinkel (born 1941) is an American visual artist, activist and educator whose practice includes experimental light studies, photography, conceptual and graphic works, and public art.
In 1959, she enrolled at University of California Berkeley, attracted to its reputation for liberalism and political activism, and while there, participated in demonstrations over the Bay of Pigs invasion and HUAC while mainly studying sculpture.
Her early cameraless photography lies at the intersection of art and science, using diverse imaging technologies in abstract inquiries into the potential of form revealed by light.
[25][26][24] Beginning in the 1980s, she turned to highly political art, broadly influenced by conceptual artists such as Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys and Allan Sekula; this work sometimes faced censorship.
[27][22][28][29] In the 1990s, Pinkel also extended her scope to documentary, exploring the experiences of disenfranchised groups from Cambodian refugees to American garment workers in longitudinal, multifaceted projects detailing narratives of history, trauma, cultural loss and survival.
[25][26][4] Los Angeles Times critic Suzanne Muchnic described them as "handsome abstractions with the gee-whiz appeal of successful illusionism and the longer-lasting satisfaction of well-composed subtleties"; Coast Magazine called them "startling glimpses into the heart of the union of form and light" combining technology and the hand of the artist.
[1][25] For "Manifestations of a Cube" (1974–9), Pinkel created what curator Kathy Rae Huffman called a "biography" of a small, square glass dish, capturing its essence in photograms, cyanotypes, video (the early digital film, Intuition, 1977), and other techniques.
[12][24][34] For works such as Peas (positive/negative) (1978–82) and Cherries (1982), she placed objects (small toys, animals and artifacts) onto a charged selenium plate, exposed it, and then made positive and negative prints described as simultaneously detailed and abstract, and radiating with energy.
[5][43] Thermonuclear Gardens (1981–1991) was a series of twelve installations—its title a pun on military "plants"—that investigated the growth of the U.S. military-industrial complex and nuclear industry and its negative impact on the environment, health, jobs sectors and geo-political regions; it combined in-depth, footnoted research, text, light works, and photocopied and crumpled images (of fighter planes, hands and faces).
[47][3] Pinkel synthesized five years of historical exploration into Indochina Document, a longitudinal work that included large photographic grids, journals and letters, albums, recordings and video directly addressing genocide and trauma and their effects on spiritual growth, wisdom and cultural heritage.
[2][48][3] Included were the installations Remember Cambodia (Pomona College, 1996; UCR/California Museum of Photography, 1998), which center on grids of everyday, color photographs and text documenting humble, contemporary survivors (refugees in Thailand and Los Angeles).
[2][3][46] Artweek critic Pat Leddy wrote, "subconscious horror carries Pinkel's art toward an empathy" that was nonetheless "disquieting" against the ground of everyday American experience.
[9][31][22] Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described its storyboard-like montage of enlarged color snapshots overlaid with quotes from interviews and letters as a bittersweet picture of lives uprooted by the terror and tragedy of war, which forced viewers to "reconcile the ordinariness of the sitters with the extraordinary suffering they have endured.
[22][50] Pinkel interspersed image grids with facts about race and class biases in the federal justice system, revealing how viewers' proximity to ubiquitous products—their purchase mandated by bureaucratic rules—made them complicit with practices of unfree labor.
