The Alphabet of Creation: Granite Amit's Mystical Installations

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Leora B. Smith

I WENT TO VISIT GRANITE AMIT'S STUDIO TURNED gallery on a beautiful sunny June afternoon. A cool lake breeze blew dollops of Midwestern clouds across Chicago's blue sky. Her studio, located on Peoria just off Randolph Street, is in a neighborhood filled with the wonders of urban contradiction: wholesale food distributors and meat-packers mingle with new restaurants and former industrial spaces being rapidly converted by developers into posh loft condominiums. And of course, artists, the urban pioneers.

This was my second visit to her studio. Her work reaches across the Holocaust, and reclaims ancient mystical traditions, appropriate to someone who has studied the Zohar and the Sefer Hayetzira intensively in Israel and the United States. Her recent work focuses on Genesis, especially the creation story and the Akedah; her blending of text and images is reminiscent of Chagall. I wanted to see her installation titled "As-if-ism."

My first visit took place a month earlier when she opened her studio workspace for a gallery showing. Composed of ten large works and an equal number of smaller pieces this installation represented a year's worth of intensive work. Our conversations, which I had envisioned taking an interview format, moved freely between Hebrew and English, a seamless blending that I am inclined to call Hebreish. The topics also flowed freely, touching on sources of her artistic inspiration, our children, dreams, Torah, and the layering of languages and art.

The layers of her art are figurative, representational, and physically present, creating a beautiful montage formed from texts, images, light, shadows, and reflections. The strata of the art represent intellectual, spiritual, and visual wellsprings of inspiration and meaning. The physical manifestation of these strata are presentedvia Amit's use ofmulti-media: blackandwhite paint on wood or canvas overlaid with one or more sheets of painted or printed Plexiglas, occasionally sandwiching a neon light. The effect is startling, pointing out the frequency with which windows and glass mediate our views of the world, reminding me of the world as seen through the windshield, TV, or the video monitor. This use of partly clear, partly painted Plexiglas simultaneously creates a feeling of nearness and distance, giving voice to the flexibility of borders and boundaries. In her art, modem city living meets the riveting texts and mystical themes of the Bible. "'Her art is a kind of scripture,' says Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, emeritus rabbi at K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation in Hyde Park. 'It's a kind of retelling, a reshowing, re-presenting the words of the Bible and of the tradition. I think she makes them vivid.... And she chooses the ones that move her and she shows them to us in a way that, I would say, confronts us.'" [1]

Granite Amit lives and works in Chicago, Illinois with her husband and two children. She is an active member of congregation KIA.M. Isaiah Israel. She was born in Jerusalem in 1958, daughter of Shulamit Sirota and David Palombo. She earned her college degree at Ramat Hasharon training college in art and education. In the U.S. she studied expressive therapy at Lesely College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. She has worked with substance abusers, survivors of domestic violence, and schizophrenic clients in both individual and group therapy settings. Upcoming exhibitions include a show at the ARC gallery in Chicago in February and May 2001. Her work can also be seen at the Amos Eno Gallery, New York, in March; the Redhead Gallery, Toronto, Canada, in April; the Gedoc Gallery, Hamburg, Germany, in October; and in a solo exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery, New York, in November 2001.

"The daughter of David Palombo, the Israeli sculptor best known for his iron gates to the Knesset and the doors to the Hall of Remembrance at the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, Amit was named after her father's preferred medium for sculpting. When she was born, Palombo was working primarily with stone. Amit feels lucky to have been named at that time in his career. 'Shortly after that, he began to build with his main material, which was iron,' recalls Amit. 'So it could have been worse. My name could have been metal or bronze.'" [2]

The "As-If-Ism" installation was introduced to viewers on a wall covered with Plexiglas printed with a black bold face explanation. The text was punctuated with donut shaped circles presented in groups of three, occupying the leading of every third row of text. These donuts were reminiscent of over-sized washers or O-rings but are actually the flat metal base of a faucet. These circular images interjected a technological overtone into her futuristic psychological explorations. In more recent installations faucets and neon lights, representing water, have been added. When Granite first used the word "As-If-Ism" during our conversation, I had not yet seen the printed text. As our conversation was largely conducted in Hebrew, I was convinced that I was encountering unknown vocabulary. Spoken in her thick Israeli accent with the s's sounding like strong z's it took several repetitions before I was able to deconstruct "AsIf-Ism" back into its English word parts.