ARTIST STATEMENT

Witnessing and grappling with the genocidal attacks against Palestinians as a Jewish artist is what birthed this show. As I watched, grief-stricken, the events that unfolded after October 7, 2023, only the most recent injustices in over 70 years of occupation, I entered into a serious and painful conversation with my Jewish ancestors about trauma, about unprocessed grief, and about cycles of abuse. As a child, I was obsessed with books about the Holocaust, reading every story I could find. I wanted to understand and feel what had happened to us. Perhaps some part of me sensed that there was still so much for us to feel and to process through our bodies, and in our communities, in order for our people to continue to thrive and to hold onto our humanity.

As I watched livestreamed footage on my phone day after day of things I never imagined I would witness in my lifetime, I saw how inhuman we have become. I see it in my family and people I love, even in parts of myself. I love my Jewishness and my family and I wrestle with how we can be taught by our sacred texts that every life is a whole world and still say yes to such killing. But I know that so many said yes to deaths of our people and we bear an enormous woundedness as a result of it.

Work with angels began as a series of paintings born of grappling with my family and ancestors and myself, a desperate attempt to somehow paint sense into the connection between the Holocaust and genocide in Gaza. But these paintings were impossible to finish. Only the very first one I attempted reached completion. Zichrono Livracha (shown below)is a painting of reckoning with my Zionist grandpa Mort (z’l), whom I loved, a painting about reaching into other worlds in the hopes of turning curses and pain into blessing, into healing.

I sat with the unfinished paintings, lost in the impossible attempt to make sense of any of this, feeling helpless and hopeless, unsure what the role of the artist is in . And then I sensed the more-than-human world surrounding this process and I opened up to the possibility that my work as an artist was not to make paintings with clear statements about genocide and ancestral trauma but to create space in which we could all grapple and grieve and touch the unsayable together, with support from the beyond-human. I began to work with angels—the angels of ancient Jewish tradition, as I understand them—and with the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. I asked for help. I brought in a river I love, the Laurel River, and asked her for help too. I asked the ancestors. I asked the very materials I was working with: oil, wood, fiber, plastic, my own hands.

And what emerged was a kind of ritual grief sanctuary whose strange architecture invited collaboration between all who entered and all of these spirits, angels, ancestors, elements. At the opening, we sang together. We called in the angels and called in ourselves. Candles were lit, water was poured, stones were placed, we felt the songs and our own breath moving in the space.