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AVODA: Objects of the Spirit - Ceremonial Objects by Tobi Kahn

September 23 - December 1, 2000

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This exhibition features 58 ceremonial objects created by the New York-based artist Tobi Kahn. With poetic vision and contemplative curiosity, Tobi Kahn has created a new vocabulary for Jewish ritual objects. Like his paintings and sculpture, these works reveal the timelessness of nature in its ancient, eternal presence. They are also strikingly contemporary in their refusal to allude to familiar and domestic conventions of Judaica. Instead, they point to a sacred and mysterious realm, beyond conscious knowledge, while retaining Kahn's persisting commitment to the hand of the artist.

For Kahn, these objects are fashioned not only to be used but also to be handed down as embodiments of love and community. He made many of the pieces for family festivities-for example, a wedding canopy (chuppah) and a circumcision chair-in order to interpret a venerable tradition for our day. In all his work, Kahn has invited the viewer to enter a heightened and simplified world, one that rejects the merely decorative for the essential. In their spare, meditative grace, these devotional objects express Kahn's conviction that art can be a means of exaltation.

The past quarter century has seen an increasing interest in reexamining the conventions of objects of Jewish utility. That exploration has probably enriched Jewish collections somewhat more than it has contributed to the actual evolution of ritual performance or ritual objects. Kahn's work fosters this evolution, serving to establish a new bond between the artist and the person performing the mitzvah (ritual obligation). That relationship must inevitably be one of mystery, a mimesis of the transformation that religious observance seeks to encourage. It also suggests that Tobi Kahn has elevated the artist's role beyond the aesthetic.

Kahn's paintings and sculpture have been shown in over 25 solo exhibitions and more than 70 museum and gallery shows. His most recent museum exhibition, Metamorphoses, was curated by Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus of Art History at U.C.-Berkeley. The critically acclaimed exhibition demonstrated what Selz calls the art's "magical luminosity," linking Kahn's work to that of the Luminists, to the American Romantic tradition, and to the Stieglitz group-Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

AVODA: Objects of the Spirit-Ceremonial Objects by Tobi Kahn is a traveling exhibition curated by Laura Kruger and organized and circulated by Carol Spinner. The exhibition's appearance at the de Saisset Museum is sponsored through a generous grant from SCU 150th Anniversary.

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