Dreaming of a Third Eye: Deborah Ugoretz on art and spirituality

When Deborah Ugoretz first came to Red Hook, in the year 2000, the neighborhood and its artists charmed her immediately. “I was just inspired by this whole environment,” she says. “This neighborhood exudes creativity and production.” It took some time, but Ugoretz eventually moved her own studio here in 2011 and has become a huge booster of Red Hook’s artist community. She co-organizes Red Hook Open Studios; the yearly event where local artists open their doors to the public. We talked to Ugoretz about the community she loves, and about her own work, which often takes inspiration from Jewish spirituality.

When did you first start making art? Were you an artistic kid?

I always drew as a kid. In fact, I had this dream when I was about 11 years old – it happened three days in a row. So, the first night, I have a little slit in my cheek. The second night, the slit is beginning to open. And the third night, I’ve got a third eye there. And I always felt like, first of all, it was really freaky for an 11 year-old to have a dream like that.

I was just going to say. Did you even have any idea how to process that image at age eleven?

It totally freaked me out. I don’t know. I just felt like I had a different way of seeing the world from my relatives, my cousins who I grew up with. And I always liked to observe the world. I was addicted to watching variety shows on TV, and I would create my own variety shows by drawing them. I had a very visual sense of the world.

You work in a lot of different media, but I want to talk about these works you make out of cut paper they’re almost like woodcuts or prints.

With Wisdom, cut paper art by Deborah Ugoretz

I first saw works like that either in Israel when I was 18, or in the Jewish Museum—they’re part of a Jewish tradition of paper cutting. When I saw them, I was really intrigued by the idea of just taking a piece of paper and cutting and creating negative and positive space. I thought it was a very interesting problem to deal with. How to have the sense of balance.

It’s a kabbalistic idea actually, called tzimtzum. It’s the idea that God builds his presence in these vessels and they exploded with his energy and created these voids, between these shards floating around in the universe. And the emptiness is sort of the space that has to be filled in with meaning.

On that subject, there are a lot of concepts from Jewish thought and philosophy that crop up in your work. What was your relationship with Judaism like growing up?

it was certainly multifaceted. I mean, grew up as a pretty observant Jew, I guess you’d call us “conservadox.” Which means, conservative synagogue but keeping kosher, not working on the Sabbath. And also growing up in this youth movement, where you’re really kind of taught to have this unquestioning love for Israel.

But then there were always the challenges of wanting to be like everybody else. In public school, we celebrated Easter, we celebrated Christmas. And they would sort of do a little nod to Hanukkah by singing some stupid lame song. It was this sort of conflict of loving who I was, but also wanting to be a part of American Christian society.

Before I discovered the paper cutting, I really didn’t have a sense of the potential within Judaism to create art. I saw these paper cuts, and they were full of imagery of animals and flowers, and it opened my eyes. So, I started looking in text for visual imagery and found tons of visual imagery within prayers and the Bible and rabbinic thought and language.

Do you believe in the Jewish God now, as an adult?

Eh, we have a difficult relationship. I don’t think I believe in God, but I believe in something. Some kind of inspirational force.

It’s interesting. I don’t do the work to praise God or glorify God. At all. It’s more like a way of communicating the wisdom within the teaching. There are like these gems that are still relevant today. Of keeping up hope and finding beauty in the world.

You’re one of the lead organizers of Red Hook Open Studios. Is it inspiring to get to see all the work your fellow Red Hook artists are doing?

It’s been great. I really love doing it. I love meeting everyone. I get really inspired and energized. It’s building community, as much as you can with artists who are a little bit buried in their work [laughs]. They’re very focused, but they do also need community.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

One Comment

  1. Pingback: Ugoretz Art

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air