cadmium yellow pigment, yellow ochre pigment, mars red pigment, indigo pigment
helium balloons, ribbon, paper
magazines, cardboard, tissue paper, rice paper
glass jars, glass pipe, Fronto, Game Leaf, tobacco, wrappers
Nikki's yarn, Grammy's thread, Jean's thread, Grandma’s thread, store-bought thread, e-bay thread, e-bay
used Sparklers, unresolved paintings

                                                                                                                  clothes hangers

black wrap, drum heads, oil paint 
AVB's sculpture covered in dirt
dried flowers
plastic wrappers,  plastic bags, plastic plastic plastic, bubblewrap
aluminum, lingerie, to-do lists, junk mail, budget balance sheets, lighting gels, Jean’s lace, various fabrics
panty hose, photoshop

pins and needles 

March 2019 - present 
Ongoing Still GrOwInG

Middleman: The Imperfect is Our Paradise, is a self-reflective journey through the City of Baltimore seen through the life and paintings of contemporary artist Raoul Middleman. 

As Baltimore's industrial harbor is transformed into luxury apartments and tourist attractions, 85 year-old artist Raoul Middleman continues to paint the city that shaped him and the people who surround him. Driven by a love of burlesque and Baltimore's working harbor, his paintings record a history of Baltimore that is now being re-developed and re-branded. With the help of interns and assistants, Middleman works to archive and sell some 10,000 paintings stored in his warehouse-studio in East Baltimore. Filmed through the lens of an artist 60 years younger over the course of five years, two different generations  meet in the present to unpack the sea of time and change that lay between them.

In November 2017, Middleman was awarded a Production Grant from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Film & Media Studies at Johns Hopkins. The feature-length film will premiere in 2022. 

Directed and produced by Madeline Becker
Edited by ReAnn Orr 
*excerpts shown in this application edited by Madeline Becker for the grant while ReAnn continues to hack away at the feature-length edit 

Associate producers: Travis Levasseur, LaTonya Joyce, Nikki Powell, Kate Lindsay, Elizabeth Stapleton
Director of Photography Madeline Becker
Additional cinematography by Ja-Mar Jones, Sonya Norko, Kate Lindsay, Minji Kim, and Kirby Griffin 
Production Sound Recording by Christopher Broholm, Madeline Becker, Elizabeth Stapleton, and Swaroop Sardeshmukh
Advisors: Lana Wilson, Michael Taylor, Bryan Wizemann, Ramona Diaz, Annette Porter (courtesy of the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund fostering mentorship)

With special thanks to my dad, who was taught by Raoul in 1982 in Delaware, and who taught me painting and grit as a kid so I could navigate the art world and do better than he did. 

https://www.middleman-film.com/

In "Weaving Ourselves Out," which takes on a fence-like form, braided strips of aluminum are sewn together to weave a crumbling tapestry. Braiding and weaving are repetitive processes that are used in all cultures, from hair, to rope, to blankets for warmth. A gradient of cut, ripped, and manipulated pantyhose blocks certain openings in the braided aluminum. The fragility of materials renders the chainlink-like fence useless as a barrier.

Performance currently being developed with dancers to fully flush out this piece.

"Promise Land" is a collaboration with artists at Make Studio. Make Studio is a studio and work space for artists with disabilities in Baltimore, Maryland. The result of the collaboration is a piece that is far more joyful, energetic, and lively than anything I could have made alone. One of the artist's wrote "Promise Land" on one of the colorful gels he was shaping, thus giving the piece its name. 

Art extends beyond the object and outcome.

Workshop and installation 2017 .

View Make Studio here:  http://www.make-studio.org/home.html

Societal and cultural walls draw invisible boundaries between people. These boundaries dehumanize us. I am interested in making objects that divide and re-shape the space they occupy. These structures are ruins of what was once a boundary. Cut holes, perforations, and large gaps negate the wall and provide windows to the other side. The history and cultural meaning of materials inspires me. Advertisements bombard us - urging consumption - making shopping a culture of its own. "Bombardment" is made almost entirely with advertisements left on the doorstep.
"Cavitation" draws inspiration from brick buildings and skin and its form from women's bodies. It began as a single, long sheet of paper. I laid down on it and traced my body seven times, altering my height and thickness each time. These body outlines were then cut out and stitched back together, the contours of their waists, hips, busts, and legs dictating how they would fit together. Tiny windows were meticulously cut throughout the seven bodies. Bits of lingerie, silicon, lace, silk, and other special fabrics were then suspended with stitches into the window openings. Unglazed windows, providing just enough space to see to the world beyond, but not large enough to step through, and enter that world. I've always picked at my skin, tearing it up and scarring it before I can stop, this is a direct manifestation of that. I pick at my skin less now.

Collected over the course 2014 and 2015, the cotton balls, q-tips, and makeup triangles were all used during my daily routine of "putting my face on" in the morning and then taking it off. In a growing awareness but continued use despite their throw-away nature, I saved some of the materials from the waste-basket and made a series of self-portraits.

Pantyhose were once an unspoken requirement for women to wear. Now unnecessary, they are a choice women have and a relic of more rigid times past. I have worn tights since childhood, finding comfort in their constriction. As a teenager and young adult, I found comfort in their thinning qualities. Concealing and revealing. Not done for self but to fit the self into magazine likenesses. 

Similar to makeup foundation, pantyhose are produced in a variation of skin tone shades from “nude” (light creamy beige color) to “suntan” to “coffee” to “jet black.” The names given to pantyhose illustrate how mainstream consumer language is skewed in favor of caucasian consumers’ needs. This creates a subtle mainstream language that establishes white as the primary expectation while othering people of culture. It’s a language of passive destruction, a language that damages internally. 

Drawing inspiration from the Memento Mori and Vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, the subject is a vase of cut flowers.  Images from the Boston Marathon Bombing and a vase of dead and drying flowers are exposed on top of one another again and again to form a shifting stained glass image.

We live in a segregated society. In 2019, our country is the least segregated it has been... ever, but is still nowhere near equal and fair. "Reconstruction," "Fault Lines," "Split," and "Fission," all deal with that separation. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and moved from a suburban public school to a city public school in seventh grade. In ninth grade a fight broke out in Algebra class after a white student coaxed a black student into a fight, using racial slurs. The security guard was thrown into a glass cabinet as she broke the fight up, the white kid ran off into the neighborhood, never coming back, and the black student changed schools the following school year. In general, friends came and went from the school. Nothing made sense. And no adults were contextualizing our environment, or even acknowledging the multitude of social situations its student population was faced with.

It took years (still taking) for me to find language and unpack the racial relations of my upbringing as well as in present life. There still isn't verbal language, as words can cross themselves. But with this series, (and most of my work,) I was working through that history with the materials themselves - color, torn and cut paper, staples, plaster, paint, string, detritus from my studio. "Split" was more of an unconscious piece, while "Fault Lines" began with the intention of using highways and their destructive history to African American neighborhoods as the basis of its form. "Fission" came from watching atomic bomb footage in slow motion, a kind of mesmerizing cycle of destruction. "Reconstruction" was an attempt to make a piece empty of content, like a projector projecting only light. Unhappy with the piece, that blank projection screen was torn apart and stapled back together. The outcome was almost identical, this time held together with office staples and new layers - the light and dark separated, on the verge of tearing apart again.

The drawings in the “Vessels of Broken Dreams” series are drawn from a deteriorating plaster bust cast for the actress who portrays the celestial beings in the project "A Troubled Mind."  
Our bodies contain our spirits, our souls, they are vessels. When the spirit has left them, what remains?