July 2024

Hold Me Close, I’m Re-membering How it Goes

Eli Liebman & Lynsey Robertson

July 5 - July 31

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Opening Reception on Arts Night Out

The works of Hold Me Close spring from the desire to question an unthinkable and unknowable world and self. The presented work - a body of quilts, a collaborative “newspaper,” and a few ceramic sculptures - embraces a wide range of disparate parts into familiar and quotidian containers. The gentle fabric whispers, clay remembers gesture and gaze, and Nerve Meter gathers a chorus to tell differently the maladies and ecstasies of today. Visual motifs proliferate to play within and against given ways of being. These paths appear at once all too familiar while still strange, enticing yet insidiously alienating. Suppose it went a little differently.

• Eli liebman Bio

  Eli likes to question why we are conscripted to live such canalized lives. In an effort to breach these

  artificial banks, Eli spends time learning how to do things and then likes to learn how to do other things.

  Eli works in whichever media make sense for communicating a concept/emotion, yet with particular biases for the tactile ones often with utilitarian histories (namely clay, fabric, printmaking, drawing, and wood).

  elimack.weebly.com

• Lynsey Robertson Bio

  Lynsey is an artist working in sculpture, print and sound to explore performance and ritual in the service of re-enchanting matter. They often work with the multiple in media such as cyanotype or clay, to practice devotional attention to matter and sculptural re-interpretation of myth. Lynsey lives and works in Los Angeles.

  lynseyjrobertson.com

June 2024

Run and Return/ רצוא ושׁוב

Jay Smith

MAY 31 - June 28

Opening Reception on Arts Night Out

רצוא ושׁוב (ratzo v’shov) is a Chasidic concept that emphasizes our dual desires and tendencies to “run” to the divine, to cleave to Gd and escape our earthly existence, and to “return” to our mortal bodies and material world, finding divinity where we are. As Rabbi Arthur Green describes it: “Opting for either world…can only lead to prolonging fragmentation. We see spiritual ebb and flow, moments of absence and moments of presence, as central to the human religious situation…can we step beyond conflict and see the thing as rhythm?” (After Itzik: Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality, 1971)

As a trans, American Jew living in a country and time where trans bodies are under threat, and where Jews are implicated and engaged in extreme violence, Jay Smith seeks to explore the pull towards and push from their tradition. Smith’s illustrations grapple with their relationship to Judaism, naming explicitly the comfort, healing, and wisdom that their tradition has gifted to them, while at the same time bearing witness to the tradition being twisted to justify death, exclusion, and alienation. They seek to reclaim their tradition from extremists and cultivate protective Jewish magic for their community: trans Jews in diaspora. Their work asks the questions: what does it mean to run to Gd when we are responsible for immense suffering, and what does it mean to return to our own bodies when they no longer feel safe?

• Artist Bio

  Jay Smith (they/them) is an illustrator, clinician, and Judaism enthusiast. They have no formal arts education and credit their grandmother Sylvia with teaching them to paint at an early age. Their artwork reconstructs traditional Jewish ritual for a contemporary audience, and creates protective spells for trans bodies and spirits. They currently reside on Nipmuc/Pocomtuc land in so-called Florence, MA with their partner, Clare, and two cats, Gene and Charlie.

  www.mmmjaysmith.com/contact-wells

  @mmmjaysmith