Ryan Van Der Hout

In the series More Important Than Bread, I use challah, a ritualistically important bread eaten on Shabbat and Jewish holidays, as a means of investigating the trauma embedded within beauty. These pieces have been cast in iron to suggest fossilization, a process through which each soft, fluffy loaf has transformed into a hard, sharp object. The ""loaves"" are held and encapsulated by slabs that resemble slices of earth. Elegiac and viscerally evocative, these reliquaries suggest the transmutation of bread, body, ancestry, and religion into geological phenomena.