JUST LOOKING
Based on the simple question Do you ever feel like someone is watching? and the power of the feminine gaze, Just Looking was an intricate and invasive installation of interactive art by Susan Hensel herself. The culmination of just under 3 years of preparation, Just Looking was comprised of a wall of over 600 self-portraits of the artist set into a grid that then served as a backdrop for live projections of people attending the opening.
This award winning series hatched full blown in the summer of 1997. While certainly these works express a continuing concern with the issues of war, they are more raw and confrontational than anti-war work from the past. While technically these are assemblages, they seem like books to me. They were conceived as book structures, having covers, spines and interiors that must be accessed by the viewer, one section at a time.
I had been studying the holocaust for nearly a year for a major bookwork that I would finish by 1998. I approached my holocaust study in the same way as I begin the research for the literary sculptures. I read Delbo, Weisel, Speigelman, the text of Shoah, and others; the great writers of that time, not the historians. Perhaps historians can help us understand why holocausts happen. Until that magical time when we can say without doubt it will never happen again, it behooves us to do all we can to prevent the carnage.
This is what I chose to do...art work that screams.