Dormant

The relationships between matter and word, life and death, are the forces at work in the works before us.

Here, they appear as a refusal of the dichotomous division represented by the words on either side of the hyphen. The exhibition title, Dormant, expresses the same idea:

"…for even in what is inanimate — dust, stones, and the like — there must necessarily exist a spiritual vitality, a mazal." So it is written in Etz Chaim by Rabbi Chaim Vital.

In the period following the Second World War, rubbings were made from Jewish gravestones just before they disappeared forever. A rubbing — also known as ‘frottage’ — is a technique for reproducing a texture or surface, capable of revealing, for example, an inscription carved into stone that has gradually become concealed over time. The stone bears the traces of life; the letter impressed into matter is always, and necessarily, a sign of life.
The opening statement of the Sefer Yetzirah declares that the thirty-two paths of creation consist of the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The letter precedes the word. It is the beginning of creation — but an act of creation that is not yet complete. Creation at the threshold of the letter is a moment in time, the instant before the seal: the seal of the word, which is the seal of meaning. The word has the power to render the living closed and fixed, sealed and mute, whereas the letter remains open to possibility.

Matter itself — the “inanimate” — is not devoid of life; it contains life in a dynamic state of becoming. The stone sculptures in the exhibition carry within them animals; a horse, a bird- not as finished forms but as presences still concealed within the material, seeking either to be born or to be buried. The stone does not decide whether it is a tomb or a womb. What precedes birth and what follows death remains concealed within matter, and matter is therefore always pregnant, bearing them within itself, encoding life, preserving a secret. So too, the sculpture is never fully revealed to the eye. It is always simultaneously visible and hidden, much like life itself.
In other works, the body itself appears through frottage. A woman lays her body upon graves, extracting signs of life from the stone into her own body. Nothing less will satisfy her. The knowledge engraved in the stone becomes inscribed upon her flesh. In this way, she narrows the distance (between life and death, between matter and word). Creation takes place in darkness, upon the face of the abyss, the moment after the abyss, the moment before the world’s great ordering, before its clear and deceptive contours, before the name, before the word, before life and after death."They must contain an animating vitality."
Vitality is motion. It seeks an open space in which it can move. The impulse that runs through the body of work is the desire to remain alive, that is, to leave room for doubt, room for change, like a letter: an open field of possibilities.