My work addresses perception, legacy, and belief as recurring themes. As a form of artistic autoethnography, I use found materials and glass elements to create work that considers not only what we remember and believe but how, and follows narrative threads as they traverse time and place. With an interest in how people form belief, my work considers constructed systems that range from the sacred to the mundane including: religion, consumerism, family legacy, and politics. Within that framework I look at the tension that exists between the dogma and the lived experience. I am interested in how we choose to embrace or deny our inherited legacies and how these choices manifest intergenerationally to shape belief and identity.
This investigation began by learning about my personal inherited legacies. I investigated the intersection of Jewish legacy and lived experience by questioning, imagining, and reinterpreting Jewish law and traditions. Judaism interests me due to its unique attributes of debate and argumentation as mechanisms for expounding on ambiguous passages and laws. Secondly, Judaism manifests very differently across history and the globe while still maintaining a distinct essence. As a result of its multicultural and geographic differences, Judaism is difficult to categorize. It probes categorical markers and feels to me like the progenitor of identity politics. There is a tradition of debate and interpretation in Judaism called midrash. I consider my work to be visual exegesis that continues this practice and a methodology for synthesizing seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge- historic Jewish tradition and my own lived experience.
By reinterpreting common objects in unexpected materials, compositions, or relationships, I seek to create a new context that elicits the need for further investigation. I believe arts most powerful function is its ability to create spaces for dialogue, introspection, and connection. My goal is to create work which demands active participation in the construction of "reality," and which requires an attempt to reconcile expectation with what is seen.