Norman Chernick-Zeitlin

This body of work displays an anxiety about history, the present, and the future of power, identity, art and politics. As a gay, Jewish, radically left, artist I have developed a fascination with my relationship to violent supremacist movements of all kinds.I attempt the aesthetic tools used by fascism such as classical figures and movement, like the futurists. I have fixated on the moving image and have been freezing stills from videos and turning them into oil paintings. I select carefully, videos gleaned from the internet that were made as a form of recruitment to a masculine violence or to a supremacist movement. I see the act of painting video stills as rescuing these images from the pixel, which I see as a violent measurement of the natural world, and freezing the fast paced motion of images that metaphorically excretes fascist ideals.