Transmission
Transmission considers Jewish cultural transmission, radical political histories and alternate homelands by placing archives in conversation with documentary photographs.
My mammograms, retina scans and sonograms reveal a breast biopsy marker, eye like an egg held up to the light, fetal lunar landscape geography. Layered over photographs of the ruined Catskills bungalow colony where my father spent his childhood summers, these pieces seek the source of my identity in places and my body and find only refusal. This culture and identity is diasporic, wide-ranging and internal.
Founded in 1897, the General Jewish Labor Bund was a Socialist party advocating “do’ikayt” or “here-ness”: a commitment to celebrating the Jewish right to life and safety throughout the diaspora, in contrast to a vision of one singular homeland. This concept animates my work.
Medical images and photographs of hills swelling, breast-like, and light falling on forest floors like it’s seeking a truth are situated among unsettling videos of Borscht Belt comedians reacting to crowds reacting to them. Am I Jewish because I’m pre-disposed to breast cancer? Because of how I see? Is identity transmitted through the body?
At times I perform my culture as awkwardly as comedian Rodney Dangerfield: I get no respect! I look through the woods for scraps of a bungalow colony like they might give answers, but the past doesn’t engage with my nostalgia. Old buildings crumble, pine trees just grow, my identity is within me and not in a contested desert across the world, a government, a place, a war.
I imagine the work installed in a dim room. A wall is painted deep gray, with large prints spread throughout in handmade frames. They glow like infrared images, there is a searching feeling. Light falls on the prints like sunlight on the forest floor.
The sound of crowd laughter filters in. Rear projection shows poorly copied videos of comedians receiving crowd responses with a shrug, a cringe, a flourish. They hold a violin awkwardly, rise up on their toes, gesticulate wildly; we can’t hear their jokes.
Large banners hang from wooden dowels, moving gently. One depicts my fetal son, another my breast with its “area of suspicion,” a third images of my retina like setting suns. Is Judaism transmitted through birth, the body, perception? Tangible and not, genetic or cultural, it is something to be continually sought and questioned. Its borderland quality troubles and it escapes me but is undoubtedly mine. The searching is the place. I live here, in this body and this culture and this self. The Bundists said that wherever we live, that’s our homeland. I hear Yiddish cadences in the phrase.