ARTIST STATEMENT

My work has always come from my need to play with everything. I make things instinctually, using whatever materials are at hand, and often invoking rules and parameters within which I try to challenge my resourcefulness. Lately this practice has focused on recontextualizing preexisting content culled from the internet and other day-to-day media. I work intuitively, focusing on color and form, often arranging fragments in a series or large field of content in which the individual components become abstracted and their meanings change.

These sorts of projects investigate the microcosm and macrocosm of individual and culture. We see in them not only the people who created the content originally, but also ourselves. We experience simultaneously the familiarity and unfamiliarity that comes from selective repetition of imagery, and the intrinsic human pleasure of pattern and organization. Ideas of technology and obsession come to bear when considering the time-consuming, tedious process by which these works (and often the individual components themselves) are produced.

Recently I have given artist’s talks at Johns Hopkins University and the Museum of European Photography in Paris and have shown work at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, and internationally. My first solo show in New York City at the Cue Gallery in Chelsea is scheduled for 2014. My current pride and joy is the handmade conversion of a plumber’s box truck into a fully sustainable home, in which I travel and live. It kind of looks like a monopoly piece. 

BIOGRAPHY

Dina Kelberman is an artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. She works in a wide variety of media including comics, painting, web media, animation, playwriting, photography, and screencaps. She is a founding member of the Wham City collective and a weekly comics contributor to the Baltimore City Paper. Kelberman was recently invited to create an original web-based piece, "Smoke and Fire," for the New Museum.