Milcah Bassel
Father Tongue
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.
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."
Events
March 16 - April 10, 2015
March 30, 2015
April 13, 2015
April 26, 2015
A vocal and movement sequence that will explore the time-based equivalent of the spatial installation performed by Bassel and members of the Brandeis community. This event is part of the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts.
Selected Press
April 21, 2015
The Justice