Mira Burack:
Sacred Bouquet

form & concept | May 2023

Sacred Bouquet is the New Mexico debut of Mira Burack’s four-channel video installation and sound bath, originally commissioned by Los Angeles-based Bridge Projects and featuring contributions from Jason Janusch, Rachel Shuman and others. The work explores new ways to step into a space of community care through ritual and rest, offering audiences a sensuous, secular route to accessing the ritual framework of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Burack also debuts a series of collage works that continue the artist's practice of creating assemblage works from repeated motifs in her domestic environment.

Sukkot serves as a celebration of the fall harvest and is partially observed through the construction and occupation of a four-walled outdoor structure, called a sukkah, and activation of a ritual bouquet, often called the arba'a minim in Hebrew. The four Middle-Eastern plants grouped together in most Sukkot settings are replaced with Burack’s chosen Southwestern counterparts – the yucca, juniper, prickly pear and piñon – as the four walls of the sukkah expand into the high desert environment, acknowledging the importance of ecological health in enabling human celebration. In Sacred Bouquet, viewers are invited to immerse themselves in an actionable, enmeshed dynamic between community and landscape, offering a chance to sit and rest, cradled by the luscious, rose-tinted desert landscape.

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