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Jim Winters: Presence
In Presence, San Francisco-based artist Jim Winters explores human connection and consciousness. The exhibition’s portraits—more than sixty reduction screenprints—evoke friendship and influence, memory and mourning, and the vast sweep of people, ideas, and emotions that sometimes simmer, sometimes spark in our cognizance.
In the context of the PMJA and its home synagogue, Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Winters’ work speaks to the Jewish people’s singular history of loss and renewal. Also evoked is Judaism’s distinctly structured approach to death and mourning, as exemplified in practices such as shiva (communal visiting with the deceased’s family in the days after burial) and yahrzeit (the recitation of Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, in the synagogue on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, and the lighting of a candle that burns for twenty-four hours in the mourner’s home, among other practices).