Rebekah Modrak

Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer who examines brand messaging, consumer culture, and institutional betrayal using a range of media, most frequently the use of reenactments, photography, video, costuming, and performance.

Rebekah’s artwork Re Made Co. (remadeco.org) appears to be a company selling $350 artisanal hand-painted toilet plungers. The work satirizes actual company Best Made Co, which sells $350 designer axes. Re Made’s sustained and evolving parody — involving company website, brand video, social media, and product reviews — examines Best Made’s appropriation of manual labor as trophies for an affluent, white-collar consumer base and the glorification of white masculinity.

The web-based artwork RETHINK SHINOLA (rethinkshinola.com) analyzes the company Shinola’s co-option of Detroit and its promotion of the White savior myth. Texas-based venture capitalists planted the Shinola company in Detroit, Michigan, creating representations of whiteness to reinforce their “leadership,” and marketing images of Black workers being grateful for this so-called leadership. Videos in the RETHINK SHINOLA tour use hand-drawn animation on found promotional video and re-enact a company lecture to critique Shinola’s claims.

During the COVID pandemic, Rebekah examined the privatization of public education as parents began referring to formerly beloved K-12 teachers as "public servants" subsidized by their tax dollars and therefore answerable to them, as consumers. The led to the three-year project Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right's Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back (Disobedience Press 2024), a collection of testimonies by 14 educators who were fired, trolled, and threatened for teaching about the hard facts and hard truths of American history, or for offering books by and about LGBTQ people.

Rebekah is the lead author of Reframing Photography (Routledge 2011), a book critically exploring photographic representation, ethics, re-enactments, mediated vision, and other issues within the image-based world. Rather than isolating photography from other practices, the book explores photo-based reproduction as a relative of genetic cloning and spider plants; the decision not to photograph as an ethical position; the zoning of light and shadow in contemporary cities as analogous to the control and physical impact of light within imagery; among other inquiries.

Additional artworks, writings, talks, and awards at: www.rebekahmodrak.com