| Gilah Yelin Hirsch: Painter Seeks to Answer “Big Questions”
The work of professor of art Gilah Yelin Hirsch is featured in the exhibit “Big Questions: New Works by Gilah Yelin Hirsch and Elizabeth Bloom,” which is currently at the USC Hillel Gallery through Nov. 8. A companion exhibit of Hirsch’s “Vinosady Series” is also being shown at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College (HUC), which is located near the Hillel Gallery.
Hirsch’s paintings in “Big Questions” highlight a number of large works that she has created over nearly a decade. The show at HUC features a collection of smaller paintings that were executed during a ten-week stay in the Slovakian village of Vinosady. In both exhibits, she channels her Jewish heritage to explore the universal human mysteries of all people.
Hirsch’s imagery is largely inspired by histories, both her own and that of the world around her. In the Vinosady series, she depicts her emotions of visiting the western Slovakian village, known for its vineyards. The region is more chillingly known for the extermination of its Jewish population during World War II. “Desecration” and “Muse Surviving Horror” are two paintings that were born of her experience of visiting sites of atrocity in Slovakia.
“These [paintings illustrate] my personal reactions about being taken to two synagogues,” Hirsch says. “In a synagogue in Kosice were the shelves that used to hold the Torah scrolls. They had been roosted in by birds literally and their long beaks were sticking out as if they had been Torah scrolls. In another one in Sahy, I suddenly felt my skin prickling and my hair standing up, and chilled. I knew something horrible had happened there. When I came out, my hosts told me that 500 Jews had been herded into the synagogue and they had been set afire. It’s that kind of emotional reaction to things that prompts my imagery altogether.”
The paintings in “Big Questions” reflect more of a composite of Hirsch’s experiences and emotions. While “Riding Bareback on Each Other’s Souls”, and “Zohar/Zahir” continue to draw upon the artist’s Jewish traditions, “Impassionata” and “The Birthing Vestibule” reveal more personal aspects.
“‘Impassionata’” was catalyzed by being in the North Pole and seeing the Aurora Borealis,” Hirsch says. “Each color evokes a different sound as it scraped the ice. This huge, cosmic, mystical experience of color and light was altogether overwhelming and without a doubt, the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Hirsch created “The Birthing Vestibule” after touring pyramids in Egypt and seeing repeated images of Queen Nut, a deity who gives birth to the sun each day.
“The sun illuminates all the doings of the humans every day and then she swallows the sun in the west in the evening and it takes 12 hours to travel through her and be born again [the next day].
“It worked itself into a painting, in which the suns became the eggs that traveled through my body for so many years and were never used to make children, which has been the only regret that I have in my life. It was very important for me to make that painting because this issue has always haunted me.”
The descendant of seven generations of rabbis, Hirsch says she is surprised by the response to her international exhibits, most recently last July’s show at the Symbol Art Galéria in Budapest. She says that when her paintings have been shown in countries with a history of Jewish persecution, viewers often share their overwhelmingly emotional responses.
“On so many occasions, people came to me and they wanted a private meeting,” she says. “They would say things like, ‘My father confessed on his deathbed that he was originally Jewish and had to convert to save himself from the Nazis.’ I heard so many stories about people who had to hide their Judaism. This was an amazing experience for me because it was the work that [provoked this response] I didn’t initially talk about it.
“But the main thing that I kept hearing from so many people is how deeply moved they were by the work,” Hirsch continues. “And that it happens all over the world is the most gratifying.”
Hirsch says that interpreting her paintings have two components: what they mean to her and what they mean to a viewer. She hopes that the latter factor precedes during the experience and that viewers can gain meaning from her work through their own unique understanding.
“My hope is that the viewer first sees the work and forms their own opinion, their own emotional stance, their own associations,” she says. “And then only after that, should the viewer if they’re interested, look at the artist’s blurb about it. The [two perceptions] can evoke totally different things.
“There are certain elements of composition and form that reach all people because we are human creatures,” she says. “We have the same hardwiring and we have the same emotions, even though our cultural context is different.”
Hirsch has spoken extensively at conferences throughout the world, including most recently, the Global Philosophy Forum at Haverford College in Philadelphia and the Yale School of Divinity. Her projects, which often include the direct involvement of her students, include facilitating murals for the Watts Health Center, a partnership with the YWCA Greater Los Angeles Sexual Assault Crisis Services, and holding a workshop for pediatric cancer patients.
An internationally recognized expert on healing through art, Hirsch says that the creation of art has been for her and many others, a cathartic release.
“One of the wonderful things about the creative process is that you can work out many emotional issues or any other kinds of issues in a newly inventive, reborn way,” she says. “That which may be painful can be transmuted into an image which is universally evocative and brings new vision into the world.”
- Joanie Harmon
Photo above: Gilah Yelin Hirsch, professor of art (at left), dances to traditional klezmer music at the opening reception of "Big Questions" at the USC Hillel Gallery with Elizabeth Bloom, collaborator in the two-artist show.
Photo by Joanie Harmon |
