Artist Statement
I am multimedia artist and my work stems from a long-held drawing practice that prioritizes intimacy, simplicity, and accessibility when examining how the histories and mythologies that inform our present take shape. Growing up in Israel, and subsequently moving between Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, I found drawing to not only be my preferred medium since a young age, but also one that could be easily packed up and taken on the go as a sort of peripatetic studio. My practice has, however, expanded in recent years to break out of the medium’s two-dimensional constraints.
As a queer man and Jewish-born foreigner, I do not feel a kinship with any extant art historical lineages. Instead, foreignness has come to define my position as an interloper amongst the traditions of others. To expand my visual lexicon and move my drawings away from the wall and into the space of viewer, I have begun to employ found imagery, spray paint—purposefully distinct from traditional painting techniques—as well as more sculptural modes of presentation. The installations that result, can be exemplified by Kanada (2018?), a pile of 200 or more books that I’ve wrapped in vintage gay porn, and spray painted pink so that only a small circle of the underlying image appears; and Fugued (2021-), a sculptural transcription of the various translations of Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue, for which I write each word on a piece of paper, shapes it into a hollow box, and places it next to adjoining words in a horizontal plaster container, effectively forming the lines of the poem that are then stacked one atop the other.
These ongoing projects, though rooted in a meticulous drawing practice, engage and respond to the space in which they are presented while also encapsulating some of the themes that recur throughout my work. As Fugued draws upon the work of a French poet who wrote in German while living abroad, it reflects something of my own cultural position and poses a consideration of the ways in which languages collide, fracture, and may or may not mirror one another through translation. Kanada, alternatively—which references the eponymous Nazi barracks in Auschwitz where personal belongings of value were sorted and one of the few places where prisoners sent to perform this labor were more likely to survive—speaks to the way that society collectively pours a torrent of intense feeling into certain historical events, effectively obscuring the very scope and nuance of those histories, and leading to a far more myopic understanding of our past and present.
My practice is, on the whole, informed by a reckoning with cultural histories, both personal and societal. Having discarded my Jewish identity, it persists as a phantom with which I am in constant conversation. Having embraced my position as a foreigner and queer man, I have discovered that such dislocation actually engenders a heightened degree of experimentation, and a freedom to choose which languages or aesthetics are my own. As a result, I have developed a highly distinct visual vocabulary, through which I mine ever-prescient questions about identity, race, history, and sexuality.
