This World and The World to Come

 2026, collage and gouache, 22″h × 30″w 

Inspired by a Talmudic passage on closing a dying person’s eyes on Shabbat — an act likened to snuffing out a flickering candle flame, since the precise moment life ends is unresolved. I reimagined this as two robots: one tending the other like a nurse at a bedside, watching for signs of response. But if the “patient” is a machine, the question shifts — what would it mean for a bot to be alive, and could care extinguish something never quite alive at all? Amulets, traditionally used to ward off evil and illness, line the walls on the bot’s behalf. Each robot’s circuitry is drawn from phrenological charts, echoing the Kabbalistic idea of the skull as a map of one’s connection to the divine.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

• Diagrams
• Gouache
• Hand colouring
• Hebrew text