ABOUT

Miriam Ancis is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley in history and an ordained rabbi from the Hebrew Union College in New York. She also has an MFA in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design. Her sculptures and drawings have appeared in solo and two-person shows at the In Khan Gallery in SoHo, New York, and in group shows in the United States and France. Recently, Ms. Ancis took time from fine arts to devote herself to developing an art, artifact and history-centered online Jewish museum for kids and teens called Toldot.org: The Online Jewish Museum of the Next Generation (www.toldot.org) and to raising her three children.

REFLECTION

My work explores the intersection of the personal and universal throughout the cycles of my life and those close to me. The work addresses my world before my children arrived, once they filled my life, and after it contracted by my mother's death. These experiences, along with others that define the self, meet and separate, influencing the texture of a life.

Early sculptures, made of pink encaustic and wool, explore birth and childrearing through the interplay of abstract meditative organic forms, sexual suggestions and everyday objects. Charcoal drawings offer powerful yet vulnerable shapes that fluently reflect one another, like thin folds of skin or cells reproducing. Plaster constructions, as seen in the fireplace installations and the flower series, instantly evoke the comfort and the danger of hearth and home, the tension between growing and being cut off. Taken together, the work builds and deploys a visual artistic vocabulary that serves as a metaphor for living.

Recent drawings and paintings emerged as I struggled to reconcile vital memories with agonizing ones of my mother's dying. The work explores a visual metaphor of the heartbeat: a line on an ECG graph morphs into nature's pulse – an interlacing of veins or an ocean's wave. The beat arcs across a primordial green or an atmospheric orange, a fluid background or a dispassionate grid, juxtaposing a technological reading of health with the body's reality. The drawings have a distinct physicality. Softly textured, thickly applied pigment creates a soft tactility and a compelling immediacy.

The intimate experiences of my life, filled with the richness of friendships and family and emptied by the impoverishment of death, echo life's cycle as it has been lived throughout human time. In my personal reflection of this truth, my art wrestles with uncertainty, vulnerability and pain in an effort to keep hope alive.