Migration- Over Land and Sea
My new work is Migration: a Footnote Over Land and Sea. It builds upon the visual language of my previous work (most notably Codex Parliament, 2017) and asks questions about our rich immigrant history: what does it mean to be here at this juncture in history and how does this fit into the broader context of migration over thousands of years of story-telling as Jews?
Narratively rich, this work is composed of quirky watercolours and air brushings painted upon disassembled copies of the 140-year old German magazine, Over Land and Sea (Uber Land und Meer, 1876). This copy, printed just five years after the Franco-Prussian war, depicts colonization and Orientalism and prophetically shows us the way Europe marched itself toward World War 1 via militarism, exceptionalism and tribal instincts. Painting on this surface, the past confronts the results of its philosophies and bears witness to the way migration over the past 100 years is a result of these historical injustices. A direct visual dialogue and intervention to dig up these old ghosts and confront the iconography of the past results from the blending and juxtaposing of disparate elements, lending a Surrealist logic to these meditations on themes of migration, fear, anti-semitism and the hope for acceptance.