Just Is in the Art of Samuel Bak

In this series of paintings and drawings, Lady Just Is appears in varying conditions, poses, and garbs juxtaposed with familiar biblical and secular symbols of covenant in states of ruination: faded and cobbled rainbows, disintegrating Mosaic tablets of law, unblinking and stony eyes, sagging and unkempt blindfolds, defunct and imbalanced scales. Presiding over a landscape of devastation, these images are a graphic reminder of the precariousness of justice, and how justice loses its agency when it turns a blind eye to, or even becomes actively complicit in, the worst injustices. But they are also a hopeful contravention against the emotional and physical wreckage, a reminder that the restoration of the world, tikkun olam, is possible through the gathering and reassembly of the shards. Lady Just Is, shown to us through the hand of the artist, seeks to engage the viewer in a new moral law that stands squarely amid, not above or removed from, the destruction.