Work with Angels
Exhibition dates: March 31 - April 4, 2025
Closing reception: Thursday, April 3rd, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
detail from "Kadosh (Holy)", oil and dry pigment on panel, 2025
Artist Statement
As a Jewish person deeply disturbed by the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, I wanted to make paintings that would speak about the link between Jewish trauma and the current situation in Palestine/Israel. I began with direct paintings of images from both the Holocaust and from atrocities Gaza, and after a while found that this approach was falling flat and that engaging so intimately with the imagery of genocide was too much for my spirit.
I began to take a stranger and more spiritual approach to this body of work. Instead of a collection of paintings about genocide, the work that emerged coalesces into a temple space, presided over by the four archangels of Jewish tradition (Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel) and the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire. In this temple, the painful imagery of violence and atrocity is laid to rest under a layer of dirt. Piled stones (with their long lives and knowledge of slow change) are asked to represent and hold our grief, and we are invited to take up the ancient task of connecting to the more-than-human world through somatic ritual. These small ritual acts are meant as a reminder that we can always tend to the connection to what is beyond human, that we in fact are not the ones who know what is best, what will come, or how the story ends, and we never will be. It doesn’t mean we don’t fight for what we love, we don’t stand and resist, we don’t make calls, raise money, speak out. But I have found that there is other work to do, and we can’t do it alone. To create spaces of possibility for new realities to emerge, we have to collaborate with the more-than-human. They go by many names and have many forms, but in this work I call them angels.