PENUMBRA Members Gallery | Ilisa Katz rissman
April Is the Cruelest Month by Ilisa Katz Rissman includes a series of family portraits and vivid moments of stillness in a summer home where Rissman spent time over the last years. As the artist notes, the series is her attempt to reconcile the depths of personal grief and the loss of life’s certitudes. The way Rissman captures light becomes a personal quest and a visual endeavor at the same time, collapsing notions of time and space.
- Giada De Agostinis
April is the Cruelest Month
April was the month my mom passed away. She was my person, and then she disappeared. Feeling abandoned I wrote to her furiously in a string of consciousness. And when writing ceased to be sufficient, I made photographs as a way to get through the day.
I searched for anything that could provide a sense of equilibrium. This came in the form of a summer home my children and I inhabited for nearly a decade. The home was filled with remnants of the family who owned it, and felt as if we were given permission to inhabit their lives. I would look at their happy family photos - deliberately placed around the house - and project their seemingly content and functional world onto our own.
The well proportioned rooms refracted other-worldly pale orange light filtering through the Cape Cod foliage, seemingly suspending time. I drifted into a fantasy of a safe, cohesive family, as I saw this light envelope my children in loving warmth. The home became a vessel to witness and record my growing children, as each summer when we returned, this light would reveal growing bodies, fresh scars and pajama pants that grew too short.
Time slows down immeasurably. I languish in unstructured days allowing my mind to drift. Light becomes the timepiece, defining my days. Evenings illuminate the days’ accumulation of suppressed feelings and fears. Nights are spent creeping around until dawn, when reality is heightened yet nothing is real. I record the early light gradually defining the familiar, as each moment morphs into a memory of what came before.
Here in the midst of loss was the simple gift of domesticity. The thing I could give them regardless of the ache that sat right next to us. With my camera I attempt to construct a sense of normalcy, connecting with what is most meaningful and real: moments in time as we cocoon ourselves, creating our own daily rituals undefined by expectations of the outside world. This act of seeing grounded me. It was how I survived, tethering me to the present. Being behind the camera protected me, somehow, from reality.
I was desperate to hold onto these moments of mothering and felt deserving of feeling like a “family.” Perhaps I believed that by swaddling them in this world of playing house we would be safe in our womb. Nevertheless, memorializing my children was not enough to keep them unscathed, nor did it allow my mother that precious time with them. Yet, these moments of connection were what I could control.
Artist Bio
Ilisa Katz Rissman studied photography and film at Art Center College of Design after earning a B.A. at Boston College. She then began a decade-long career as a commercial photographer, in addition to pursuing personal projects. Her work appeared in a variety of national publications including, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Interview, Saveur, Town and Country and Metropolis. Ilisa published two books, one titled Chairmania in which she photographed the miniature chair collection belonging to the iconic designer George Beylarian, and she was the featured artist In Photo District News: Ilisa Katz’s Simple Vision.
For the past several years Ilisa has dedicated herself to working on concurrent long-term personal projects and commissioned portraits, choosing large format analog cameras. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards from jurors including James Rondeau (The Art Institute of Chicago), Stephen Perloff (The Photo Review), Joseph Carroll (Carroll and Sons), Julia Dolan (The Photographic Center Northwest) and Jennifer Blessing (The Guggenheim Museum Of Art). She recently won the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for People and Culture and three of her photographs were exhibited at the 2016 Berlin Foto Biennale. Her work has been posted and/or reviewed in The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Slate and she is a BRIC Arts Media Fellow.
Ilisa lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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