Held in Absence, 2024
Iron, Steel, Formica, Pigment Print on Vinyl, Flocking, Plywood
43" x 20" x 6"
Series: More Important Than bread
Further images
In the More Important Than Bread series, Van Der Hout uses challah, a ritualistically important bread eaten during Shabbat and Jewish holidays, as a scaffold to investigate trauma embedded within...
In the More Important Than Bread series, Van Der Hout uses challah, a ritualistically important bread eaten during Shabbat and Jewish holidays, as a scaffold to investigate trauma embedded within beauty. Cast in iron, these bodily abstractions of challah have fossilized. Each bread has transformed into hardened, sharp incarnations of their once soft, fluffy bodies. They seem to have been extracted from, or perhaps even forcibly find home within, nearby slabs that resemble slices of the earth; the negative space perfectly recalls the shape of each challah. Elegiac and deeply visceral, these reliquaries consider the transmutation of bread, body, ancestry, and religion on a geological scale.
- Sarah Cho