Looking Out / Looking In
2021 Member's Exhibition

 

Bassis

Aileen Bassis

www.aileenbassis.com
Aileen Bassis is a NYC artist and poet. Her artist's books are in many public collections including Yale, Swarthmore and Lafayette College. She received artist grants from the Puffin Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and NJ State Council on the Arts. Her solo exhibits include Watson Institute at Brown University, York College in Queens and Ohio University in Athens. Her artist books have been exhibited at the Center for Book Arts in NYC, Cornell Museum at Rollins College, Hunterdon Art Museum, Jersey City Museum and others.

Guns

I began working about gun violence several months ago. Mass shootings keep happening in this country. This is a double-sided accordion and I've included the names of cities where mass shootings have occurred and the list keeps going on. It was not always like this. I'm a grandmother and I did not worry about my children being slaughtered at school. My grandsons have already had a lockdown experience because of an active shooter in their neighborhood. Tragically, guns seem to have become the "new normal" in America. This is a 9 page double-sided accordion of inkjet prints with mixed media, joined by knotted thread.

Guns by Aileen Bassis
Closed 9 x 9"
Inkjet prints, acrylic paint, ink, pencil, thread
2022

Mundane Moments/ Tomorrow Becomes Yesterday

This accordion book is about the pandemic experience – the dwindling of life into a sequence of daily tasks, time seeming to move at a crawl and, yet, uncounted moments slipping by. This work both looks out at our more limited world and inside at the incessant movement of our hours. The pages that have images about time are in black and white and smaller paper, making the viewer hesitate to turn the pages just as we stop and start throughout the day. Edition of 5

13 x 11" closed
Inkjet prints
2021