EVA STURM-GROSS

What does it mean to inherit a broken tradition? Eva Sturm-Gross’s premier solo exhibition Beasts of Eden, represents an invitation into a fragmented symbolic world. The mystics of the Middle Ages teach us that the reality of creation is a shattered one, like the shards of a broken vessel. Her work thus balances the central tension of Jewish diaspora, communicating both a longing for messianic redemption on the one hand and a rootedness in exile on the other. This rootedness is expressed principally by Sturm-Gross through the animals of the Upper Valley, her homeland. The creatures that populate Beasts of Eden are drawn from her encounters with the natural landscape surrounding her childhood home in Hartland, Vermont. Biblical narratives here are portrayed by the fauna of the Upper Valley. Figures with the head of a mourning dove are cast as the protagonists of Genesis. The memory of a fox informs her representation of a vignette from the Song of Songs. A sacrificial red heifer, finally, is imagined in the form of a Vermont dairy cow. These scenes exist at the intersection of an immediate corporeal reality and the timelessness of myth. Sturm-Gross’s balance of traditionalism and experimentation makes her a unique contemporary voice. Her use of the canon is exemplified by the ubiquity of her animal-headed figures, a common motif in medieval Jewish aesthetic culture. The layered meaning of her practice mirrors the principle of manifold interpretation, wherein multiple and contradictory meanings can coexist in a singular form. Like the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral, the experience of this exhibition aims to communicate a feeling of proximity to the sacred that transcends its theological scaffolding. The beauty of nature and the beauty of divinity coincide to imbue this place, this landscape, with the taste of paradise. The Upper Valley in Sturm-Gross’s mythos reveals itself as a kind of Eden.