The Levush Project is a series of originally designed hand-fabricated textiles consisting only of syringes and pharmaceutical packaging for testosterone treatments I used since the early 2000s. The focus of the project is the research and development of these textiles, for creation of wearable artworks to be worn in choreographic and vocal performances. I have archived the packaging (including prescriptions, inserts, boxes, bottles, patches, packets, syringes) of every form of testosterone treatment I have used in order to repurpose them via textile design as a conceptual artwork. Fabrication methods have included forming pharmaceutical packaging into sewn strips, using syringe components as beads, hand weaving, loom weaving, paper making, and felting. The textiles are then used to make a suite of wearable artworks which are functional (traditionally men’s) Jewish prayer garments: a tallit katan (tunic), a tallit gadol (prayer shawl), and a kittel (death shroud).
‘Levush’ in Hebrew means ‘clothing’. I am however drawing from a Chassidic concept of hitlabshut, an elliptical idea of enclothement:
It refers to the Infinite/Divine taking on the “garb” of finitude, of the world as we see it; a container, outside of language.. Using this Jewish grammar of enclothement I could create a series of performance garments, as a fabulation of the skin. The woven pieces give flow, drape and porousness to rigid, angular and impermeable materials, these same containers whose contents have masculinized my appearance and transformed my experience politically and somatically, under through and beyond skin. Over the 20+ years that this packaging was collected, testosterone preparations changed, and trans culture archive, including laws, language and customs changed, as did my physical embodiment. I wish to continue interrogating how materiality and substance determines physical form, as a way to interrogate how the state makes moral and ethical claims on bodies. I’m thinking about a sovereign body (Preciado) as a skin, a visible external surface onto which power writes its law.
A transsexual response to the Chassidic concept of hitlabshut (enclothement). Originally designed textiles made of packaging from 7 years 15 years 20+ years of prescription hormone treatments. The textiles are then used to make traditional (i.e. men’s) prayer garments: tallit katan (tunic), tallit gadol (prayer shawl), kittel (death shroud). Garments 1 and 2 designed with Atom Cianfarani, fabricated with Atom, Daniel Lang Levitsky, and some mentorship from Heather MacKenzie, Vincent Tiley. Loom woven samples woven by Heather MacKenzie. Currently in progress.
Bio:
Tobaron Waxman is an interdisciplinary artist who sings. Traditionally trained in Rabbinics and chazzanut in Orthodox yeshivas, many of their artworks incorporate these literacies in ways simultaneously reverent and decolonial, and have been both exhibited to critical acclaim and censored, internationally. Tobaron created and directs The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency since 2013.
