Israel Omer 2023
For the past nine years, I’ve tried to find meaningful ways of marking the forty-nine days between the Jewish holidays of Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot, a process known as Counting the Omer. Traditionally, one simply marks the counting with a blessing and an acknowledgement of that particular day. The mystics, however, use an expanded system involving the sequential pairing of the seven lower sefirot (the attributes of the divine in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah) resulting in forty-nine pairs, one for each day. These pairings are then used as a meditative device. Over the years I've applied this system to writing projects, drawing projects, and, in the case of the present works, a sculpture project.
The context of this project was a five month stay in Jerusalem in the spring of 2023. I had gone there to study traditional Jewish texts and, missing my studio, I decided to count the Omer by making a sculpture a day for forty-nine days. With the cooperation of an art space named HaMiffal ("the factory"), I created a 7x7 wall grid of forty-nine 11" squares, filling each with a small sculpture as the Omer progressed. each row and each column were attributed to one of the seven sefirot, resulting in forty-nine combinations. Ultimately, I gave most of the sculptures away, as it was too complicated to try to bring them back to the U.S. The images in this section are of ten of my favorites, four of which I was able to save (the ninth, Tiferet sh'b'Yesod, was made for a bookish eleven-year-old and was the only piece I made with a particular individual in mind).
You will notice that I have not included dimensions for the individual pieces. You can, however, get an idea of scale by imagining them fitting within an 11"x11" square. And as for the titles (and these are among the only works I have ever titled), they follow a simple formula for the sefirotic combinations of the grid: the first word is the sefirah (divine attribute) of the day; "sh'b'" means "that is in"; and the following word is the sefirah for the week. And so the works are titled simply as a way for me to remember the day on which they were made, as well as what I was thinking about when I made them.