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June 5, 2009
Judaism in an artistic light
Two students use Jewish themes for Emily Carr grad projects.
DEENA LEVENSTEIN
Michael William Ambrose is from the Bahamas. He came to Vancouver to study industrial design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and it probably did not cross his mind that his grad project would be connected to Shabbat. His "kosher lamp" was on display at the graduation show on May 2.
The lamp, called Elumae, is kosher for use on Shabbat. The mechanics, all of which are in the lamp's base, allow the user to cover, instead of turn off, the light. He is not Jewish but his inspiration for this project came when his Jewish friend, another international student from Mexico, named Daniel Elnecave, started taking on more Jewish observance during their time at school together.
At first, Ambrose was skeptical about his friend's changing lifestyle but, at the same time, he was intrigued by some of the new challenges Elnecave came up against. In industrial design, Ambrose explained, you watch people's daily actions and create objects to assist them. Ambrose saw that a recurring theme for Elnecave was coming home to a dark apartment on Friday nights because his roommates would turn off the lights and Elnecave couldn't turn them back on. So Ambrose decided he'd create a lamp to solve this problem.
First, he read up on the Shabbat laws and brainstormed a few concepts. He took his first designs to Rabbi Avraham Feigelstock, the rosh kollel of the Ohel Ya'akov Community Kollel, who explained to him why none of them would be OK for Shabbat use. Throughout the project, Feigelstock has been his halachic (Jewish law) consultant and, Ambrose said, "There would have been no way for me to accomplish what I've done without [his] assistance."
While working on his kosher lamp, which is almost finished, Ambrose's classmates often jokingly asked him if he was converting to Judaism. Though that is not in his plans, he said about Elnecave's decision, "maybe it's not necessarily as crazy as all that." Many times, Ambrose has been present when Elnecave lights the Shabbat candles. He said that he sees a "wind of relaxation" come over his friend.
Elnecave also just graduated from Emily Carr, with a bachelor's in media art, majoring in animation. His grad project was a short film, called Under the Olive Tree, about a boy in a ghetto during the Holocaust. The boy creates a golem-bird out of the mud where he is sitting, outside a public park where he isn't allowed to play because he's Jewish. A golem, according to the legends, is a figure that has been created by Jews when they needed someone to fight for them. The movie is shot in sepia and is silent in a "Charlie Chaplinesque" way, explained Elnecave. The boy brings the bird to life and it starts flying around, with color trailing behind.
The main technique Elnecave used is pixelation. This is a method similar to stop-motion – wherein an inanimate object is moved one millimetre at a time, taking a photograph each time – except with real people.
The whole set was made out of cardboard. This was done in order "to show contrast between how unreal this must have felt to them and how gritty and awful it must have been to live in this world that was kind of unbelievable. So everything looks kind of strange and moves as if it were a model," Elnecave explained.
The child's golem-bird brings him an olive branch and then disintegrates. Meanwhile, his mother, back at home, hears a knock at the door, which is Nazi soldiers coming to tell her that the next morning they must be ready to board a train.
In the final scene, the mother and son are on the train and he shows her the olive branch. "An olive branch, a bitter gift from heaven, should sweeten even the most bitter of times. That is the one thing that they can't take away from us," the mother says, as the train pulls away from the village. A pile of luggage is left on the platform.
Elnecave lost his mother when he was 12 and he explained that, at the time, he made a conscious decision to "re-gather and make the best that I could." He continued, "My way of seeing the world, even as a kid, I always thought that there was purpose and value in learning in everything that happened to me." Elnecave said that one of the messages he is trying to get across in his film is that people's beliefs – in this case, the boy believes the golem-bird is real – whether they turn out to be true in the end or not, make a real impact on the person's experiences in the moment.
Elnecave will be travelling to Israel in August to spend a year learning in a yeshivah in Jerusalem. Afterwards, he's "hoping for a dreamy niche job doing art and animation working within the Orthodox Jewish community, but hopefully not losing touch with the non-Jewish art world." Ambrose plans to stay in Vancouver for the next year or two, working on different projects including developing a line of small ceramic items as home accessories.
Deena Levenstein is a freelance writer from Toronto, Jerusalem and now Vancouver. You can visit her blog at deenascreations.com.
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