Jewish Clothes - 06

Jewish Clothes

My wife Mary Bogdan is an artist/gleaner. Much of her work consists of working with found objects, discarded items (AKA trash), that she collects from everywhere.

We live in a neighborhood, in Montreal, that has a fairly large Jewish/Hassidic population. One day, as Mary was doing her rounds, she found these two large garbage bags filled with old clothes. She decided to lay them out on our back yard lawn to inspect them and air them out. In fact they were all clean. Evidently washed before bagging for the sake of whoever should find them.

Soon after laying them out on the grass, a thunderstorm came and Mary was preoccupied with other things, so she just left the clothes out to get soaked and become victims to the rain and wind.

The storm passed as quickly as it came. As I stepped out to look, I saw a sight that felt like a punch to my gut. The clothes were all lying, spread out as if they had been bodies that had disintegrated or separated from the clothes. My feeling was as if the souls were gone and all that was left was the memory of the people that were in them.

I photographed the scene and put together what will (hopefully) one day become a photography exhibition.

Here I combined the images in a video montage along with a haunting piece of music I composed and performed to convey that initial feelings I felt after the storm.

As a Jew whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, I am a second-generation survivor. I carry the collective memory and emotional trauma as do so many of my generation whose families endured similar life tragedies. This exhibition and video are representative of the depth of emotional healing that I hope to provoke with my art.

To see the short video I created from these photographs, please go to this link .