Exploring the ways that images and objects take on value from sacred to consumable, my work questions how symbols become meaningful and how society agrees to this assignment of value. Through sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and video, I tackle how we internalize and filter the world through magical thinking, institutionalized religion, and consumer culture (including their rituals, values, and sacred items) that reinforce our own ego-centric world view. The work is psychological and pungent, with an underlying interest in eliciting emotion from the viewer. My approach is to use humor as a material. Humor has no mass or volume yet is infinitely malleable. It magnifies vulnerabilities and prejudices, revealing individuals' humanity. Humor allows the ideas to take root in the body; it comes from the gut and is inherently emotional. The crux of my practice is to explore the absurd, tragic, and contradictory nature of living that humor can uniquely portray. Both of these interests are directly informed by my Jewish identity. I was raised around rituals, symbols, and the use of humor to understand the world and our place in it. Humor as a weapon or defense mechanism has been a useful tool verbally and aesthetically, from the most lowly to holy because it’s been the only way to make sense of the absurd world we live in and is deeply rooted in Jewish history. Methodologically my work is deeply Talmudic, and addresses the full spectrum of the lived experience, whether it is focused on issues that are big or small, with equal importance. I do this without a sense of linearity, returning to themes and works whenever there is a new angle to be explored. While this may not be unique to my experience alone, it is the only one I know.