Thursday, June 9 at 4:30-5:30pm

The Land Within/ (My לאַנד Travels With Me)

with artist Jessica Rehfield

Spanning two years of research, Jessica Rehfield’s current work considers boundaries of the 200-year period of intense antisemitism in Europe that preceded the Holocaust, including institution of the Pale of Settlement, instability and violence that marked Jewish experience.

Investigating the geopolitical conditions of her family’s origins in and immigration from antisemitic Posen (previously Prussia and Germany, now Poland) to the United States in 1871, she follows parallels in the search for identity of the Jewish-American disapora with the quiet desperation that ties Queer, Jewish and immigrant bodies to the land they occupy, within a context of the cycle of shmita. Two paintings will be completed in the atrium of the Eastside Jewish Commons with maps of former territories and new ones, investigating the meanings of queer bodies and self, land and belonging and the influence of other queer artists’ work on land, identity and immigration on her work.