LOS ANGELES, CA.- Kopeikin Gallery presenting Women by Rebecca Bird. This exhibition marks Rebecca Bird’s fourth solo presentation with Kopeikin Gallery.

This exhibition presents monumental scale paintings based off of photographic images of cross-generational women. The paintings are situated in allegorical juxtaposition to create a dialogue between tropes of womanhood and the act of posing for a photograph. The images typify the independent kind of historic record made possible by home photography, that made by families and individuals for their own purposes, to create a record of their existence and appearance. The scale of the works evoke the tradition of History Painting, reenactments of moments for the historic record, once considered the highest genre of painting based on the importance of the subject, the acts of great men. These works contrast with History Painting in that the moments depicted are mundane and the figures unknown.

Additional works in the exhibition explore the notion of Sigmund Freud's theory of Screen Memory, in which an individual's construction of a false memory or cover story is used to replace an anxiety producing memory. Screen Memory takes a double meaning in this presentation as it also refers to film, national and popular history superimposed over private or domestic history. The Screen Memory paintings are based off a photograph of a nuclear bomb test and in Bird’s work explosions represent immeasurable traumatic experiences. Her process of recreating the image of nuclear bomb explosions multiple times implies the process of retelling and construction of memory into a Screen Memory.

Rebecca Bird (b.1972 in Lynnwood, WA) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her highly detailed paintings explore intersections of personal and collective memory, subjectivity and interior states, while being rooted in a rigorous engagement with the craft and history of painting. She often uses archival photography as source material in order to examine the idea of history as encoded in images. The process of analyzing and painting from these images becomes a means to further understand how historic images are absorbed and repurposed by individuals to structure their private experience.

Bird holds a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union (2000), attended Yale Summer School (1999), and was a Fulbright Fellow to Japan (2000) in painting. Bird's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in private and public collections including the Microsoft Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rebecca Bird has been represented by Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, since 2009.