LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design presents “The epitaph project: 1995 - ”, A multimedia installation by Joyce Burstein on view through August 31, 2006. Joyce Burstein began the epitaph project in 1995 by securing a mortgage for a plot at Hollywood Forever, a notable and historic cemetery adjacent to Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. The public artwork exists as a tombstone carved from slate like a chalkboard and is accompanied by a bronze box containing chalk. Passersby are invited to write an epitaph on the stone, and then she collects these sometimes profound or irreverent compositions with a photograph. Currently, she has two other tombstones installed in Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio, and The Fields Sculpture Park in Upstate New York. The project has extended into a multi-media presentation in the Bolsky Gallery and a forthcoming book with an essay by Peter Lamborn Wilson that enlists the help of all spectators in a process of self-discovery about death and life, as one does not exist without the other. www.epitaphproject.com.

Joyce Burstein received her BFA and MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to exhibitions she has developed a number of independent social/public sited art projects. As her gallery and museum installations explore both permanence and the ephemeral she attempts to contravene associations of the monument with death and the historical by presenting works that interact with life and the present. A recipient of fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Matters and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Burstein lives and works in New York City.