Verretete Eisenmann in association with Anne Eisenmann and Laurie Felix
The Dialpainters
The eponymous dialpainters are the two thousand women who worked in the studio at Radium Materials Corporation during the first World War. Radium was used at the time as a luminescent marker on watch faces. The tool of application was a very small brush that was pointed between the lips. The exposure to radium poisoned and crippled the workers. A series of lawsuits began in 1927. One of the former painters, Catherine Donohue, gave testimony from a wheeled-in bed. After excruciating defense delays, the company settled without admitting culpability.
The exhibition The Dialpainters presents three oil paintings by the artist’s mother, Anne. One painting is on the face of a watch built upon a clone of a Swiss movement. The watch itself is housed in a watch winder located in a nook inside one of the gallery walls. The other two circular oil paintings depict a landscape and a black 1984 Corvette. Both paintings are inserted in to the doors of two metal safes, which are completely inset into another wall.
The door of one of the safes is cast in aluminum from a linoblock cut by Anne’s mother, Mary, depicting a clam digging scene. The other safe door bears an inscription of the holding company. In a nearby wall niche, lie a pair of gloves which, using RFID tags, act as keys. Each glove opens only one safe.
The video opens with a scene of actress Laurie and her granddaughter Vanessa in Laurie’s Corvette, recounting an episode in which Laurie’s visage was stolen after she responded to a classified ad for a jewelry model. Her images were used to create a viral Instagram account named Gran Holly. Another scene in the video shows a quiet afternoon moment in which Laurie cares for her own mother, Mona Lisa, who is re-learning to walk.