DIVINE LIGHT

“DANCE TO THE MUSIC”

“DANCE TO THE MUSIC” is an Ushpizen to honor the female lineage that links the Ba’al Shem Tov to his great-grandson, Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810). The Ba’al Shem Tov was married to Hannah, and they had a daughter, Adel, who was a healer, herbalist, and a true tzaddeket. Adel’s daughter, Feiga, also considered a holy person, was called ha- Nevah (the prophetess) and was the mother of Rebbe Nachman.Rebbe Nachman encouraged his followers to clap, sing and dance during or after their prayers, bringing them to a closer relationship with God.
The center image in “DANCE TO THE MUSIC,” is from an embroidery with a joyous, folk-style theme that was hand-stitched by my mother and which acknowledges my own female heritage. I combined the embroidery with images that were photographed from my studio window, with seasonal flowers, and with a female gravestone, (photographed in Chernevtsi, the Ukraine), as there are no stones to mark the women’s graves from this historic family.
In this art-work I am welcoming Hannah, Adel and Feiga to our Sukkah and honoring their legacy with the hope that they become a stronger branch on a great dynastic tree.

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“L’SHANA TOVAH.” Jewish New Year Cards. 2015

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“DISTANT COUSINS.” 2011

Two teenage girls are wearing ceremonial clothing that expresses their relationship to their God. I stitched the images onto a collaged border of transparent headscarves and embroidered tallit. These layers, transparent and solid, represent the unspoken dialogue and threads, visible and invisible, that link their youthful fashion and religious culture. Both the jilbab and the tallit can be used to cover the head and shoulders with the intention and direction of enhanced prayers.
On the day of her Bat Mitzvah, thirteen-year-old Faith, adorned with an embroidered tallit, is standing in front of a stained glass window at her synagogue in New Jersey USA.
Rena, a twelve-year-old in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, lost her parents to the Asian tsunami. She is wearing a jilbab, symbolizing adherence to Allah’s commandments in the Qur’an, the Islamic holy text.

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“WHO DO YOU BELIEVE IN.” 2015

I photographed the graffiti drawing on a cell wall of the Women’s Wing at the abandoned Essex County State Penitentiary, in North Caldwell, NJ. Both the text and the inmate’s haunting, hand-drawn portrait poignantly illustrate one of the fundamental questions we ask about life.
I paired it with “Hallelujah,” written by Leonard Cohen and performed here by K.D. Lang, because the prayer-like music affirms a faith in life and love amidst doubts. Cohen has said the iconic song represents “absolute surrender in a situation you cannot fix or dominate.”
Alone, within the steel bars of her cage-like cell, I can imagine the figure in the drawing listening to the repeated one-word chorus coming through the open ceiling above her. According to the song, even those of us for whom “it all went wrong” can experience transcendence. As Cohen writes: we “stand before the Lord of Song/ with nothing on [our] lips but a cold and broken Hallelujah.”

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“BROKEN GLASS.” 2017

Homes are often the place of terrible pain and violence.
I was gentrified out of my downtown NYC loft, my home of 40 years. It was a beautiful space, a serene and inspiring sanctuary from the outside world. The owner couldn’t legally get me to leave. The owner tried many destructive ways to make me feel unsafe and traumatized. His workmen “accidentally” punched a hole in the wall of my bathroom, destroying my glass medicine cabinet. Soon after, a fire exploded into the bedroom where I was sleeping. I was fortunate to escape with only smoke inhalation.
Images of the historic architectural view from my loft’s front window are composited into the digital image of my glass-strewn and shattered medicine cabinet. Cotton fibers and torn pieces of sandpaper are then collaged onto the archival digital print.

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“TAMAR CLAIMS HER RIGHTS.” 2014

Judah does not want to give Tamar his third son in marriage after her first two husbands, and two of his sons, were killed by God for their wickedness. She decides to get justice for herself and secure her rights. Dressed as a prostitute, she waits for Judah. The lines drawn across her face represent her determination to be unrecognizable to her father-in-law. The light rays depict both her link to God and to the twins she will conceive, one of whom will be ancestor of King David. The fire is Judah’s initial command that she be burnt to death when he discovers he had slept with his daughter-in-law. The deeply scratched image is Tamar’s willingness to face adversity to secure her own future and place in posterity.

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“HAGAR ENCOUNTERS GOD BY THE SPRING.” 2014

Hagar was an Egyptian handmaid. The spelling of her name (hey gar) means “Adonai dwells” with her. Sarai gave her to Abram to bear a child, Ismael. But Sarai became jealous and made Hagar flee into the desert. Hagar encountered a Divine Messenger at a spring. God spoke directly to her. God forges a relationship with Hagar: “you are the one that sees me.”

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“WRESTLING WITH LEVITICUS.” No. 1, 2012

Artist, Susan Kaplow, asked me to photograph her, wearing her hand-sewn shrouds with the words from Leviticus 18 screened on the garments. We discussed our collaboration, our feelings about homosexuality being called an abomination, and how the word abomination/tahara makes Susan feel dead.
I documented her putting on the garments and followed her gestures as she expressed her pain, anger, confinement and claustrophobia within the shrouds. Susan’s performance informed my composition and narrative content. Each frame became a commentary on the text.
For this installation and for my photographs to offer another commentary on the story I found an intersection between the performance and the gestures, where the bound figure as a sculptural form goes beyond the personal documentation into its own autonomy.

“WRESTLING WITH LEVITICUS.” No.2, 2012

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“JUDITH’S SPIRITUAL JOY.” 2012

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“SELF-PORTRAIT with MY FATHER’S TEFILLIN AND TALLIT.” 2012

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“TWO GENERATIONS.” 2016

I photographed a mother and her daughter as they were wrapping their arms seven times while learning to lay tefillin. It is the mother’s hand that is the foundation for her daughter as they follow the commandment to bind oneself to a higher power.

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“ANNA SITTING ON THE MOON.”

Anna Stein (my grandmother) was born in Vilna, which was part of the Russian empire in 1890. She emigrated by herself to America in 1910 when she was 20 years old.

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“PILLOW FOR MY GRANDFATHER.”

In 1911, my grandfather, Michel Leib Raschkovsky, left his home in Odessa to travel to America. He was robbed and murdered in Constantinople before he could board the boat with his wife, Brucha, and two sons, Hersh (Harry) and Jossel (Jack, my father). The murderer was never found. They went on without him.
I photographed the remnants of his antiquated passport in the detritus of the scattering leaves left from Sandy, the 2012 Hurricane that struck the East Coast of the U.S. with a deadly force.
A portrait of young Brucha (now Bella) as she looked when she first arrived in America is collaged onto a page of Michel Leib’s Russian passport. A photo of his wife and two sons from 1946, thirty-five years after their arrival in America, is memorialized onto his weathered passport cover.

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