The Spiral of Time
Galete Samansky
About Galete Samansky
I am a young Jewish highschool student who has been studying shmita and its underlying values for a few months. I’ve been doing art more seriously for about 2 years now and have been sharing my art online for about a year. I have used my art to express myself and my ideas especially during the pandemic when I was locked at home. I love to repurpose things I find in my basement or in thrift stores and I especially love to paint old records and cds. I bring them from one art form to another and give them a new life in the modern day. I find it so much more fun in progress and so much more satisfying in the end to paint on something that would otherwise be trash than a canvas or piece of nice paper. I also just think moving or otherwise functional art is really cool.
About The Spiral of Time
I wanted to use my art piece to represent both figuratively and literally the spiral of time. The spiral of time and the fact that Shmita happens every 7 years go hand-in-hand. The way we see time spiral is in patterns we can’t control. On a smaller scale we can see time spiraling everyday with circadian rhythms because we fall asleep and wake up at similar times because of them. On the larger scale we see time spiraling with the changing of seasons and weather patterns. Now, I think it’s important to address that this isn’t time repeating itself because the weather isn’t repeating perfectly every season and you might wake up half an hour before you normally do. The same things don’t happen to you every time the Earth spins but it’s similar. Time spiraling means you hit the same checkpoints every time but it’s still a different loop. With this in mind I made a point to emphasize the 7th spiral to show that some loops are different and also to emphasize shmita. Though, when designing this project I wanted it to be cohesive, I wanted a limited color palette, I wanted similar shapes and similar distances because in the end it is all a spiral, it is all a loop. I’ll leave you with a quote from the preface of a book called Seasons of our Joy by Rabbi Arthur Waskow. “The Circles of the sun, and of the moon; of a single human life between the generations, and an entire people’s history of renewal; of every quiet act of newness, birth, creation—all are echoes of One Circle.” `
