Artist Statement

Existence is ephemeral. A person's experience is one frame within the continuing story of humanity.  The small particles of life, the minute moments, form the base on which a person stands. Inside the home, concrete actions are taking place: bathing, feeding, making a mess, and cleaning it up, birthing, aging, caring for and living alongside others. These actions weave together a living experience that are the foundation of every Human's unconscious.

I am a multimedia artist, whose works grow out of the American environmental, ecofeminist and process art movements, filtered through the prism of my own identity as a Jewish woman, Hassid, and mother.  

I use mediums such as photography and video performance, interactive installation, assemblage and found objects. I use dimensionality to explore the human experience through personalized narratives that include individual community perspectives and those multi-cultured sources which form an identity. The works range from large scale outdoor peices, textile-like pieces, video installations, to mini-installations in individually hung open box forms.

A series of digitally processed photographs was born out of the miniature works. I assemble miniature scaled objects, some found and some created, and arrange them alongside illustrated imaginary landscapes.   Through photographing the pieces together, the camera revisions the miniatures as true-to-life yet imaginary environments. 

I choose materials that are usually discarded or ignored: dust, old papers, leftovers, melted candles, ashes, broken vessels, voices, shadows. I incorporate rustic sculptural materials that are parts of a whole: cables and hardware, loose parts, window screen, stones, textile accessories.  I look for materials that hold no unique value but are basic materials in our environments.  I study their characteristics and tweak out their symbolic meaning.  The universally symbolic imagery I use with these materials, including house, tree, old man or baby, continues the material's play on metaphor.

The healing process from Trauma particularly fascinates me, within my art process. Trauma, is a framed moment within the continuum of life.    A fleeting moment becomes tragically significant, captured as a still within a sequence.  I connect to the process of healing, when I seek to find meaning in this ephemeral moment and make sense through looking at a larger picture of life, of mortality, of humanity.  I address the intergenerational process of healing from trauma, emphasizing how small moments are inseparable from the larger human story.  Reflections on cultural and generational contexts reappear in my works for this reason.

I am influenced by American Art aesthetics, and by movements such as echo-feminism, mysticism, and symbolism.  American Art aesthetics include the sculptural environments, as in Louis Bourgeois spider and Richard Serra's Steel structures.  They include the aesthetics of found objects assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg.  The feminist textile works of contemporary artists such as Sheila Hicks.  The echo feminism of Jewish Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who works with recycling city garbage. And the performance and use of self for social commentary and expression, of Mandela Abromovic. Mystical and symbolic works, by artists such as Hilma of Klimpt and William Kandinsky inspired my incorporation of Hassidic sources, while Magdelena Abakonowiz has given me the courage to address the collective psychology of art.