“4 Puppies” by Artist Libby Kleine Modern

My current work dwells in the space between thought and expression; between my most intimate details and the culture and history that contains them. I explore how we interpret and record moments in time that fade quickly on the surface, but linger much longer below. Each piece begins with a moment in time—a baby shower in a Leninburg apartment, the dissolution of a group of French mathematicians, the loss of a childhood friend— and proceeds as a reinterpretation of that moment, a conversation between memory and imagination, between the real and the fantastical, between the past and future. Beneath the bright colors and whimsical imagery exists a bittersweet confrontation of the difficult issues we struggle with in our search to understand ourselves within society the society within ourselves. The combinations of form, color and language emerge revealing a kind of code where the personal unexpectedly meets and confronts the public. How do we remember, present and explain our past? our history? How do we interpret (or misinterpret) the silent influences on our lives? How do we distinguish the difference between ourselves and our culture? Both the process and the result seek the inexplicable beauty and melancholy that pervade the culture we live in but don’t always address—why it is that we must struggle to find out who we are, and what we believe, why we cry when we’re happy, and why our dreams begin to fade the moment we wake up. Artist Libby Kleine Modern of Pennsylvania