SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION

Between the Suns

A site-specific installation referencing the immigrant experience, environmental fragility, and resilience.

“Artist Rachel Miller creates a textured, tapestry-like waxen assemblage taking inspiration from Jewish art traditions and speaking to the urgent need for ecological healing. The motifs in this sculptural work – composed of wax-cast forms – are extracted and enlarged from papercuts, a common form of Jewish ritual and folk art for hundreds of years. Miller researched paper artwork made around 1910 – the year her grandfather, then a young child, fled with his family to New York from Galicia. Despite the delicate, disposable material, the papercuts that inspired this project endured over a century, echoing the fragility and the durability of starting life over as an immigrant, as her relatives did, carrying little more than traditions and traumas.

The artist incorporated natural, reusable and repurposed materials, including drippings from Shabbat candles collected from across Toronto’s Jewish community. Her process reflects the continuity of the patterns, alluding to the cyclical rhythms of nature and life while acknowledging the imperative to adopt sustainable practices. The exhibition title – Between the Suns – derives from a Hebrew phrase in Jewish tradition referring to the transitional time of twilight. This exhibition harkens to our present-day limbo – between environmental degradation and the possibility for repair, between life during a pandemic and a new reality on the horizon, between the uncertainty of dusk and the rise of a promising day”.

— by Curator, Evelyn Tauben

http://fentster.org/#/between-the-suns/ Photo Credits: Morris Lum

Ascension, Descension

Passing

Passing II

Featured in Interior Design Magazine: The Naturals, vol 78, June 2007.
Collection of Calvin Tsao, Tsao-McKown Architects. Photo credits (far left images only): Edit Laignel.

Wind sweeps tracks on the earth. The snow melts, and saplings grow. So much happens in the silence of life. I walk on my swept tracks, retracing the long paths and familiar explorations. I imprint the grass where you walked two steps in front, as shadows trail my departed patterns. The past is embedded beneath my feet, concrete and permanent.

Hidden, Here

Drift

The journey is my impermanent home. I bring the essentials, to leave behind what I cannot bear. What I carry is my home, my temple, my everything.

Sleeve

Consistence/Transcience

Consistence,++Transience-1+-+Version+2.jpg

Mirror

PERFORMANCE

Surfacing

The earth inhales, the body exhales. The body inhales, the earth exhales. Branches tap each other, accompanying the breeze. The earth is in constant syncopation, flowing in pattern, rhythm, and breath. When I move, my breath becomes the conductor. I become the instrument, costumed in grasses and reeds.

Breathing Field

I walked past the trees, they swayed. I looked at my bare feet that you lay beneath. Quivering, I looked at the trees. You swayed, my body swayed. I breathed to its rhythm, my breath deepened.