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Virtual Gallery - Andrea Rosenthal Stations of the Scale


ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I was born in the Bronx but spent most of my childhood and adolescence in Virginia, where I was socialized to my regret at an early age about the importance of being thin, pretty, and nice.

Inspired by Duane Michals´s project about his family and early life, The House I Once Called Home, I´ve constructed a photographic memoir about my problem with overeating that uses text, family materials, and photographs of myself to present a visual expression of my inner state.

Stations of the Scale is the most honest and painful work I´ve ever done, taking seven and one-half years to complete. It started with an assignment in a photography class to do a self-portrait about the most important aspect of oneself, and I made an image about struggling to button a too-tight dress. Then I moved on to give my background in a family where food had great importance, where even the dinner table became like a boxing ring with conflicts over how much or how little one ate. From the time our pediatrician told my mother I was fat and prescribed a diet, I had a problem with distorted body image and secret eating. My life became a long struggle with diet after diet, and I experienced supersized helpings of shame and frustration.

Using text and images of myself as a model where my facial expressions channel Zero Mostel, I´ve tried to take an honest but ironic and wryly humorous approach to my lifelong problem that makes visual what I feel and experience and goes public with my personal narrative in a way both specific and universal.

Andrea Rosenthal: Resume