A R T I S T   S T A T E M E N T 

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The work begins with a persistent question: how do different systems of knowledge come to know one another?

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As a Jewish artist and former scientist, I find myself situated between two traditions of making sense of the world: the biblical and the scientific. Science and religion each possess their own internal coherence, methods and truths, yet their points of contact often appear limited. Rather than addressing this tension through argument or interpretation, I’m adopting a more empirical approach, by entering the texts themselves.

The work can be understood as a form of constraint-based fieldwork within language. Treating Genesis and Darwin’s text as territories to be traversed rather than doctrines to be defended, words, phrases and textual patterns are harvested, catalogued and reconfigured. Unexpected connections and correspondences are followed as they emerge from the material of the texts themselves. Meaning is not imposed in advance but discovered through sustained attention to what the texts reveal under particular conditions.

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This project shares something with both Darwin’s commitment to observation and Abraham’s willingness to venture into the unknown. Neither reason nor faith is privileged as the primary guide. Instead, the work proceeds through an empirical encounter, entering the wilderness of the texts and following where their words lead.

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The exhibition is therefore also an exploration of my own position between these ways of understanding the world. Jewishness here is not simply a subject of the work, but part of the territory from which the investigation begins. The biblical text is both an inherited cultural text and something I can approach and investigate as an artist. Darwin, similarly, is not encountered simply as an historical scientific figure, but as part of the intellectual formation from which I have come.

The exhibition invites viewers to consider how seemingly incompatible and even irreconcilable ways of understanding the world might coexist, and what new forms of meaning may emerge when their languages are brought into proximity.

Researchers at Sid’s Ledge; www. sidsledge.com; IG::stevendurbach

C O N T A C T
art.intelligentanimal@gmail.com

image detail of Word Drawings 5, Pencil on archers paper A3, $200.  Steven I.Durbach 2026.  All rights reserved.