Women's Studies Research Center

Milcah Bassel

Father Tongue

April 13 - July 16, 2015

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Artist-in-Residence and Exhibition

The Kniznick Gallery and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute are proud to present Milcah Bassel and her solo exhibition "Father Tongue." As the HBI Artist-in-Residence, Milcah Bassel worked on site to create an installation based on five letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Using the letters as a pliable material relates to her early experiences observing her father scribe Hebrew texts. For Bassel, the characters were first encountered as images before they acquired meaning as text, and this play between drawing and writing manifests in her use of graphite and ink. Traditionally, Hebrew texts are scribed by men, and her actions to flip and invert the five characters are a way to reclaim them as her own as graphic and abstract forms. Bassel used the creation story from Genesis to provide the framework for the installation, where light, darkness and chaos emerge as organizing themes.

"Father Tongue," installation view

Milcah Bassel (b. Boston MA, raised in Israel) holds a Post-Baccalaureate in Studio Art from Brandeis University (2011) and an Master of Fine Art in Visual Art from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (2013) where she is currently a part-time lecturer. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ and Tel Aviv, Israel. She has exhibited at the William Patterson University Art Gallery, NJ; Newark Museum 2014 Arts Annual, NJ; EAB fair, NY; Soho20 Chelsea, NY; Whitebox, NY; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, and Roxaboxen Exhibitions, Chicago, among others. She exhibited at the Kniznick Gallery in 2011 as part of the Floors & Ceilings exhibition for her site-specific installation that challenged ideas of bodies in space.

The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is excited to host Milcah Bassel for her residency and present her work in the forthcoming exhibition, "Father Tongue."