Emerging Artist Summer Series: Elaine Kaufmann

by Art Fag City on August 21, 2007 · 5 comments Events

minivan3.jpg

Elaine Kaufmann, The Dodge Caravan, 2006
Image courtesy Elaine Kaufmann

Artists often benefit from taking a degree outside their medium. The Computer Science, English Literature, or Architecture student who choses to work in the field of fine art has the edge of an additional skill set the art world simply cannot provide on its own. Probably my favorite example of this as of late comes from Elaine Kaufmann, who frequently employs skills she would have honed while completing her English Lit degree in her drawings and hand made books.

It has to be said that appreciating Kaufmann’s work requires at least some interest in deadpan humor. Take for instance her Minivan series (featured above), which turns the most banal car in America into a hipster-mobile via haiku. Williamsburg isn’t exactly crawling with boys wearing their 17 syllable poem t-shirts, so even the artist’s choice of medium challenges her proposed transformation. As for the verse itself, I am particularly fond of the fact that Kaufmann highlights the first model year companies used the term minivan in the piece above. Naturally prior to 1984 America was simply a used car lot for substandard design and functionality.

international-design.jpg
Elaine Kaufmann, Kid-Centric Condos, 2007, pencil on paper, 12 x 9.5 inches
Image courtesy Elaine Kaufmann

Building upon the concepts of marketing and design presented in Minivan, Kaufmann’s series “International Design” adds biting social commentary to her body of work. In these drawings the artist starts with the layout and text from home design magazines, and replaces their original photographs with those of housing in developing worlds. “Children enjoy the amenties at Wellington Tower” reads the text beneath a suite of small shacks littered with garbage. As it turns out, just as easily as the poor and unsightly can be filtered out for ease of consumption, so can the children of Wellington Tower.

Elaine Kaufman: Bio

Elaine Kaufmann received an M.F.A. in Painting from Hunter College in 2004 and an M.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University in 1998. She has also studied at the Frank Mohr Instituut in Groningen, the Netherlands and was awarded a Graf Travel Grant from Hunter College.

Kaufmann participated in the fall 2006 Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; drawings from the series International Design are included in the exhibition, Here and Elsewhere, at the museum. In 2005, she received an Independent Project Grant from Artists Space for Atopia, a treasure hunt/museum guide given to visitors to the Museum of Modern Art.


Kaufmann has also been collaborating with artists Maria Dumlao, Danielle Mysliwiec, and Anne Polashenski as the Brainstormers. Founded in March 2005, the Brainstormers are dedicated to raising awareness about gender inequity in the art world. They performed at the Brooklyn Museum in the Sackler Center for Feminist Art on May 5, 2007.

{ 4 comments }

your mom August 21, 2007 at 10:26 pm

I cant think of any better way to distance oneself from social issues than to use dry humor and a generic image of “developing” (to use an outdated term) country housing. The easiest way to give your artwork a little bit of socially conscious spice. Kind of crappy and preachy in a very distant way. Wow, poor people. I never noticed them and oooooo I hate those rich people. Good job. Elaine Kaufmann, I cant believe you got away with it. It is the clever deadpan humour that holds this work together. Oh and thanks again for posting a piece of art that connects me to the world.

your mom August 21, 2007 at 6:26 pm

I cant think of any better way to distance oneself from social issues than to use dry humor and a generic image of “developing” (to use an outdated term) country housing. The easiest way to give your artwork a little bit of socially conscious spice. Kind of crappy and preachy in a very distant way. Wow, poor people. I never noticed them and oooooo I hate those rich people. Good job. Elaine Kaufmann, I cant believe you got away with it. It is the clever deadpan humour that holds this work together. Oh and thanks again for posting a piece of art that connects me to the world.

Art Fag City August 21, 2007 at 11:10 pm

Well, that’s the point right – that we’re distanced. Personally, I’d like to see a lot more didactism in the art world than we currently do. Who are the emerging artists with overt political stances and the platforms to voice them? Not many that’s for sure.

In any case, I don’t buy that the “wow, poor people. I never noticed them and ooooo I hate those rich people” you speak of is so implicit in the work (though your comment is pretty funny.) To my mind the drawings are much more about the construction of a lifestyle facade than they are about revealing the economic relationship between third and first worlds.

Art Fag City August 21, 2007 at 7:10 pm

Well, that’s the point right – that we’re distanced. Personally, I’d like to see a lot more didactism in the art world than we currently do. Who are the emerging artists with overt political stances and the platforms to voice them? Not many that’s for sure.

In any case, I don’t buy that the “wow, poor people. I never noticed them and ooooo I hate those rich people” you speak of is so implicit in the work (though your comment is pretty funny.) To my mind the drawings are much more about the construction of a lifestyle facade than they are about revealing the economic relationship between third and first worlds.

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