winter 2023

Shemira (Stick On The Ice, Position, Dina, Joan)
concrete, wood, plexiglass, scagliola, pigments, silicon, polyurethane, steel, rabbit skin glue, garlic skins

Nested Sefirot
plexi-glass, wood, tape, gold leaf

Emanation Zones
plexi-glass, tape, wood, brass

Shemira explores my experience of becoming a hockey goalie, and how it led me to binah – the Kabbalistic emanation of “deep understanding.” This brutal and physically challenging position, this merciless male-dominated space, has become an arena of ecstatic spiritual healing and liberation.

I am the great, great granddaughter of a Ukrainian-born rabbi who left New York in 1901 to initiate an ill-fated Jewish Farm Colony in rural Saskatchewan. “Western Canada, land of storms, where Jewish intelligence is frozen in the depths,” he wrote. Three generations later, my father became the goaltender for the Winnipeg Jewish Men’s Hockey League. I never saw him pray, but I watched him take shots, block shots, fight, and be forced into submission. Was he, like me, tending to cycles of generational trauma? Discovering a wild connection to the divine?

Through the manipulation of intentional materials including the casting of my own body in polyurethane and garlic, Shemira explores internalized anti-semitism, misogyny, consent, gender, grief, violence, vulnerability and submission.

“In my mind this was not a simple summersault; something like an altar was glittering before me,” Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Paseczno.