Pamela Love

bones and stones

text by SUSAN M. KIRSCHBAUM
photography by JULIA RESTOIN-ROITFELD

 

Artist Pamela Love enjoys dissecting the dead. Edgar Allen Poe was an influence. So were her dentist grandfather, her surgeon father, and her psychiatrist mother. They weren’t that alarmed when young Pammie dug up her pet frogs, fish, and hamsters two weeks after their burials to see how much they had decayed. Nor did they mind when she did volunteer work at a Florida camp and, filled with dreams of becoming a plastic surgeon, painted pictures of children there who had cranial facial deformities. But they weren’t so easygoing about her Neil Young and punk infatuations or her guitar and drum lessons. Or her decision to leave her Ivy League school to study film at NYU.

Love ended up winning an award for RSVP, an art film that featured a half-man/half-chair and a half-horse/half-woman. “People kept saying,…