Complex Art, Amongst Other Things

This afternoon we went to see an exibit at I-forget-the-exact-name Art Museum in New Britain (which apparently has a number of museums, much to my surprise, including a Police Museum- I haven't to foggiest idea what one would display at a Police museum...). It was a fairly small exhibit, but awfully intricate, and really quite confusing at times. It was the work of Siona Benjamin, a Bene Israel (Indian) Jewish woman living in New Jersey, and it combined Jewish imagery, Indian imagery and some Americana. I found some of the assumptions and choices of imagery fascinating in the Judaica realm- I really don't know enough about the other two to be able to tell quite as much. But the Judaica tended to run to hamsas, alephs, tallitot, kippot, and tfillin, all used just a bit oddly: the hamsas the least so, the alephs tended to be placed in the torso, reminiscent of a meditation I read about in which one imagines an aleph in the center of one's torso. All the figures were female, and there seemed to be no sort of tension about the women wearing such ritualwear when they did- it didn't seem to be a egalitarian or feminist awareness thing. Or maybe it was, and I'm too comfortable with that stuff to feel it as such. But it just seemed like tools for the expression of Jewish-ness in otherwise very Indian-feeling images. Only her seder plate/mandala had more stereotypical Jewish looking figures- and that was the Ashkenazi, guitar-in-hand, artsy stereotype in action. I do wonder why she had both tfillin images step up with only the arm tefillah and with the bayit placed in the wrong place- on teh forearm. Unless that's how Bene Israel wears them... I really have a gaping hole in my knowledge base there. Maybe I can right that over the summer, somehow. Nevertheless, while I got large parts of what some of the images were trying to communicate, I felt like I was missing the message. It was a curious sensation. But the pictures were lovely. The artist is apparently speaking there sometime soon- I'm quite tempted to go if I can.

Complex Art, Amongst Other Things

This afternoon we went to see an exibit at I-forget-the-exact-name Art Museum in New Britain (which apparently has a number of museums, much to my surprise, including a Police Museum- I haven't to foggiest idea what one would display at a Police museum...). It was a fairly small exhibit, but awfully intricate, and really quite confusing at times. It was the work of Siona Benjamin, a Bene Israel (Indian) Jewish woman living in New Jersey, and it combined Jewish imagery, Indian imagery and some Americana. I found some of the assumptions and choices of imagery fascinating in the Judaica realm- I really don't know enough about the other two to be able to tell quite as much. But the Judaica tended to run to hamsas, alephs, tallitot, kippot, and tfillin, all used just a bit oddly: the hamsas the least so, the alephs tended to be placed in the torso, reminiscent of a meditation I read about in which one imagines an aleph in the center of one's torso. All the figures were female, and there seemed to be no sort of tension about the women wearing such ritualwear when they did- it didn't seem to be a egalitarian or feminist awareness thing. Or maybe it was, and I'm too comfortable with that stuff to feel it as such. But it just seemed like tools for the expression of Jewish-ness in otherwise very Indian-feeling images. Only her seder plate/mandala had more stereotypical Jewish looking figures- and that was the Ashkenazi, guitar-in-hand, artsy stereotype in action. I do wonder why she had both tfillin images step up with only the arm tefillah and with the bayit placed in the wrong place- on teh forearm. Unless that's how Bene Israel wears them... I really have a gaping hole in my knowledge base there. Maybe I can right that over the summer, somehow. Nevertheless, while I got large parts of what some of the images were trying to communicate, I felt like I was missing the message. It was a curious sensation. But the pictures were lovely. The artist is apparently speaking there sometime soon- I'm quite tempted to go if I can.