My cross-cultural upbringing, from Tel-Aviv to Montreal to Los Angeles, amongst many ethnicities and languages, gave me a fascination with the social and personal differences between peoples. I first studied sociology in the late 1960's but moved into the arts when I recognized that there was a crucial variable missing from my social studies, that is, subjectivity. How could I study others when I could not recognize myself?

As an artist, the work I have developed, exhibited and taught, nationally and inter-nationally over the last three decades, recognizes identity as inter-subjective, movements within the self and between others. Subjectivity teases a shifting power relationship between who is seeing and who is being seen. There is no fixed self, rather a self shifting in relation to how one encounters another. As corporeal beings we reflect through the interior spaces within us and through the exterior planes and surfaces of the social spaces we inhabit. Our journey through the world is psychological and political, physical and virtual, full of confusion, elation, promise, conflict, dead-ends and gateways.

Exploring identity as relational allows us to ask how our private, interior identities affect and are affected by the world outside us. What are the relationships between dream, memory, fantasy, desire, and the social, historical and political contexts which define race, class, gender and sexuality? How does the dance between interior and exterior necessarily define our relationships with others? When we are blind to others who inevitably are different from us, we may also be blind to those aspects of ourselves with which we are not familiar. When miscommunication, false expectation, hope and desire prevail, we objectify the other and objectify ourselves as separate from them. We fall into type casting, blaming, mistrust and resentment. Conflict is just a step away.

I am very aware of how social conflict has become chronically internalized within individuals and is blindly perpetuated between people in all types of social and political relationships. In 2002 I began the study and practice of mediation and conflict transformation to pro actively address personal and cultural difference, negotiation of power and reciprocity. As an artist and a mediator my work mines aesthetics and ethics. My process borrows perceptual skills from aesthetics, sensorial skills from the somatic arts and communication and negotiation skills from mediation to build self-knowledge, critical thinking, recognition of difference, empathy, and aspiration. These attributes allow for recognition and support of the incongruities so basic to our lives so that we may build social relationships that are creative, generative and sustaining to all.