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Marked by the Ordinary (Havdalah NYC)
work in progress: 2025 - present
This work, Marked by the Ordinary (Havdalah NYC), is a series of digital photomontages made of iPhone stickers that imagine Havdalah spice containers (besamim) as playful interpretations of New York City infrastructure. For years, I have photographed what I see as incidental mark-making and assemblage on city sidewalks using my phone. I discovered in 2025 that I could collage elements of these images by using the iPhone sticker feature to isolate subjects and then combine them in the Freeform app. The process is fully portable and commutes with me throughout New York City. I then realized I could use this method to cheekily reinterpret Judaica.
Havdalah is the ritual that marks the end of Shabbat at sundown on Saturday, transitioning from what is considered the holy day of rest into the ordinary week. One element of the ritual involves passing around aromatic spices for everyone to smell, often kept in a decorated container known as a besamim. The scent is meant to bring the sweetness of the divine time into the rest of the week.
The most ubiquitous form used for besamim is the silver architectural tower, which can be found in almost any Judaica store and collection today. The form originates as a Gothic church tower, and the first known example was commissioned in 1500s Germany and likely made by a Christian silversmith. For the ritual, the tower likely represents the marking of time, but also everyday life, as church towers were focal points on German streets. This iconic shape that we hold dear in our tradition would not exist without the diaspora, yet this context is rarely shared.
Walking around New York City, I find wonder within the most mundane details of its streets. Whereas 1500s Germany had the Gothic Tower, my day-to-day is punctuated by glimmering fragments of industrial pipes, construction posts, peeling wheatpaste ads—all part of my place in the diaspora. The Yiddish word doikayt, or “hereness” is a guiding principle in Jewish Diasporism. Paying close attention to this place that I call home, and reflecting it back into my conception of Jewish identity, follows a rich lineage.
Although I typically work with abstraction, these 2D collages figuratively reimagine the iconic spice tower. Nonetheless, I still decontextualize the source images and create a disorienting and oddly proportioned sense of space. The work exists in an ambiguous in-between, much like the ritual of Havdalah itself — the images are non-functional, mere representations of a functional object that holds both the old and the new, the sacred and the profane: a container for my Jewish multiplicities.