I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. My work recombines historical symbolism through the building, destroying, and merging to reestablish meaning. The work reconstructs preconceptions and ideologies by deconstructing how histories and cultures form.

 

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at the moment of our formation. To take back autonomy, I repossess historical, cultural, and religious symbolism and transmute them into new configurations. Chaotic mixing of painting, glazing, 3d printing, and hand-building recontextualizes meaning to forge new monuments for the future. 

 

This is evident in the piece “Bang My Head Against the Wall” which presents itself as a distorted Jewish washing jar. It is structured in a 3-tier system with a bottom, a middle, and a top. This hierarchy references American social, cultural, and religious hierarchies that absurdly imply that importance resides at the top. The top is adorned with an uncanny hand, printed from a Yad. It points to the sky, God, or maybe Aliens, another hierarchy above the physical plane. 

 

This reimagining and layering of symbols through clay memorializes the entropic cadence of distress, struggle, and transformation. A slow change in the tides, a thread that is waiting to weave, the end of a story. These methods act as lenses of reinterpretation, a process of building new power structures from old rubble.