DVAA Member since 2023
Dafna Steinberg
Website: dafnasteinberg.com/home.html
About:
Dafna Steinberg is a lens-based artist living and working in the Philadelphia area. Her work embodies themes such as grief, personal intimacy, and gender. In the spring of 2022, she graduated from Moore College of Art & Design with an MFA in Socially Engaged Studio Art where she completed a thesis examining how artists can use photographic self-portraiture as a form of social practice. Before tackling her MFA program, Steinberg worked as an adjunct studio art and photography professor at Northern Virginia Community College. She currently teaches at Delaware County Community College in the Fall of 2023. In addition to teaching, Steinberg has been an exhibiting artist for over 15 years. Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Knoxville Museum of Art, Grizzly Grizzly, LeMieux Galleries, Indianapolis Art Center, the Puffin Cultural Forum, and the International Center of Photography.
Artist Statement:
I am an interdisciplinary lens-based artist, whose current focus of practice is photography, found objects and text. Themes explored in my art relate to the experiences of women and the fragmentation of the female body. My goal is that my projects, while based on events from my own life, will speak to a wider audience who have experienced similar occurrences.
My most recent project, With Nowhere To Go, was an examination of grief. On March 4, 2020, my father passed away. Less than a week after his funeral, the world shut down due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Over the next two years, I tried creating work using the objects and photographs my father left behind. However, my interest in that work began to quickly wane. Delving into my father’s things was emotionally draining. The art that I hoped would help me assuage the emotional turmoil I felt never materialized. I found myself returning to a photographic form that has always been part of my artistic practice: self-portraiture. I had already been documenting my experience with grief; looking at how it affected me, my mother, and our relationship. Making these images from moments in my life gave me the catharsis for which I had been looking.
This would lead me to an examination of photographic self-portraiture as a form of social practice. Can an artist tell a more communal story by explicitly sharing their own experience? The themes of my previous self-portrait series have varied but have all connected to my own personal experiences. While these images are meant to reflect the truth, there is always an element of make believe. Fact and fiction are not a binary, but rather a spectrum. I enjoy blurring the line between the two when photographing myself.
As a friend told me while I was making this work: “Once you’ve truly seen and felt death, you can’t not be open to seeing it everywhere.” This is true in how I experienced different complex human interactions: intimacy, touch, love, etc. My grief will never leave me. It will only evolve over time. My hope is that this work that I am continuing to make will be a documentation of that evolution as well as a narrative in which others can share.
Starting with a particular Scottish legend I learned while in a residency in Scotland, I recently began a photo project exploring ghost stories and folklore that feature a "woman in white." I am interested in the way these stories reflect societal violence against women. The woman in white is a figure that traverses different cultures and countries. Her postmortem presence is a reminder of how prevalent brutality is in the daily lives of women. She is compelled to revisit the place of her trauma, determined to strike fear in the men who not only caused her harm, but also those who did nothing to help her. With this work, I am trying to imagine what a ghost might experience walking through a town, touching the bricks and stones of buildings, but being so ephemeral they cannot hold on to that space.
