Hidden and Revealed: Solo Exhibition at the University of Denver

“Hidden and Revealed” is an off shoot of my usual body of work, which explores my emotional relationship to the natural world. In this series, I broaden my explorations to investigate my connection to history, culture, language, and loss of meaning utilizing the visual, creative process.

My work considers the timeless, universal concept of assimilation, which affects not just Colorado’s and Germany’s Jewish communities from which I descend, but other cultures that find themselves lost in the melting pot of American society.

In conversations with fellow descendants of immigrants, and members of Native American tribes, I have learned that this loss of culture and language is common. We assimilate into American society as a whole, speak only English, and act like Americans. Traditions are vilified as outdated and unsophisticated, or forgotten entirely out of neglect. But, in recent years, the act that my grandfather performed, of reclaiming his Jewish heritage, has become common among many children and grandchildren of immigrants, and Native Americans re-learning and re-discovering. Western societies, including Germany and the United States, have begun confronting their dark pasts. What has been hidden becomes revealed.

As an artist, I needed to find a way to process all the information I was receiving and learning when researching my own family’s history as well as Jewish practice and beliefs. I sought to understand our family’s connection to Germany and the German language, our history as German and American Jews, and attempted to figure out what, if any, ties we had to the Czech Republic.

The visual language created for this work, the Bildsprache, conveys that sense with Hebrew grammar and Czech novel book pages and German newspaper selections layered within gestural brushstrokes, colorful forms, and expressive lines of oil and watercolor crayons, and charcoal. I also have included in some works acrylic gel transfers from books and magazines in the Beck Archives Collection of Judaica here at the University of Denver, materials from the Jewish community of Colorado that maintained a connection to Jewish practice and the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, which were spoken by these immigrants.

The works as a whole become like archaeological levels, elements at once peeking through and submerged underneath, the hidden and the revealed at once, reflecting the stanza in poet Yehuda Amichai’s poem:

“The Jews are not a historical people
and not even an archaeological people, the Jews
are a geological people with rifts
and collapses and strata and fiery lava.
Their history must be measured
on a different scale.”

The repeated motif of the landscape, seen in broad horizontal lines stretching across the picture planes, represents both my connection to the Colorado landscape, and that sense of time as perceived through geological and archaeological perspectives, which scientists excavate to understand the past.

This is not only my story; it is a universal story, and the act of creating art is a means to understand, process, and find meaning in what feels obscure, esoteric and hidden, ultimately culminating in enlightenment and revealment.