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“Something
Powerfully Beautiful”: James Dickinson Ever been arrested...by your own eye, that is? If the experience is a little less frequent these days, the senses jaded perhaps by exposure to mediocre art in every bookstore, bar, coffee shop, and lobby, then the beautiful and provocative images of Rachel Bliss will help restore the balance. “Fantastic...incredible...weird,” you exclaim. But this is just the beginning of the story. “A State of Bliss” presents an overview of the art and illustration of Philadelphia-based artist, Rachel Bliss. In recent years Rachel Bliss has produced paintings and illustrations, as well as various sculptural objects and innovative installations. Today her work is largely figurative with strong surreal and expressionist elements, and her pictures are notable for their emotional intensity, use of color, and psychological depth. Reflecting the new urban reality, her subject matter is often uncompromising and disturbing. Moreover, in an era of conceptual art often dependent on anonymous fabricators to bring to life the ideas of the artist, Bliss remains dedicated to a craft approach to artmaking, creating vivid and unsettling images through an intense and energetic application of paint to the picture surface. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1962, Rachel Bliss grew up in a large family of working artists, both immediate and extended. Her father, with two uncles, ran a graphic design studio, but he was as committed to fine art as to the illustrations and commercial commissions on which the family depended. From an early age, Bliss, with her three-brothers two of them now active as artists and illustrators-was exposed to the joys and tensions born of making a living as artists. Painting and drawing from photographs and other people’s work encouraged her visual sensibility. Home life also exposed the Bliss children to major artists such as Picasso, as well as the aesthetic heritage of Native American and African art. Regular visits to Rochester University’s Memorial Art Gallery encouraged the idea that solutions to problems in art could be found in works displayed in galleries and museums. With the family’s well-being dependent on commercial art, however, no particular distinction was made between high and low art. As a result, hard work, passion and craft infused family life and imparted to Bliss the “urge to contribute something that is powerfully beautiful.” Bliss moved to Philadelphia in 1982, where the Reagan administration’s neglect of cities, indifference to women’s issues and the burgeoning AIDS crisis, as well as its attempts at censorship, increasingly energized the alternative art scene. As a consoler to victims of sexual assault, meeting with victims of rape and family abuse in the emergency rooms of local hospitals, Bliss encountered firsthand the fractured bodies and psyches of the urban dispossessed. Moreover, living in a working-class neighborhood, she became intensely aware of the politics of poverty-of being unable to hide interpersonal and family violence behind the privately accessed services available to the more affluent, of the way in which state welfare agencies regulate the most intimate bonds of family, and of the new generation of politicians eagerly calling for government control of the body (especially women’s bodies) while espousing freedom and deregulation for the economy. One way Bliss applied her art to these issues was by making silkscreened and lithographed “public propaganda posters.” She produced surreptitiously in local art school print shops posters protesting the Hatch Amendment (1982) and Stop Blaming the Victim (1983) and mounted them in Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Diego and Brooklyn. In the late 1980s, Bliss continued her aesthetic provocations, making sculpture and installations to raise consciousness about issues of importance to women. For example, Displaced Rape Victims (1989) consisted of fifty small sculptural figures placed about Philadelphia. Some figures were later found and therefore saved. Those that had been protected were retrieved. Yet others disappeared suggesting the various fates of, as well as the ultimate societal indifference to victims of this crime. Likewise, she intended Testimony (1989), fifty nine burned black figures arrayed in an enclosed space, to educate by producing a powerful, nightmarish state in the viewer. Displaced Rape Victims II (1991), a more complex indoor-outdoor installation, consisted of 1000 small clay figurines placed both in the F.A.N. Gallery and on the streets of Philadelphia, and further explored the relationship of victims, perpetrator, and onlooker. These themes figure prominently in Bliss’s paintings and suggest that her intent is not to develop a separate feminist aesthetic around traditional women’s concerns with nurturing and family, but rather to use the full power of art to explore, in a manner as innovative, provocative and confrontational as possible, issues of importance to women. Her work is therefore uncompromising and aggressive, and depicts reality-however unpleasant that might be. It is far removed from a therapeutic approach that suggests a feminist contribution to art in the development of the self or the recovery of the damaged self. Deciding to pursue formal art studies, Bliss attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a full scholarship from 1985 to 1988. With its traditional curriculum, the Academy helped Bliss connect her natural visual sensibility with the realization of art work. The drawing class in particular was a valuable experience, imparting to Bliss’s maturing style the underlying discipline and expressive realism particularly evident in her work today.
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