Rafael Rachel Neis

 3D Commentary (Marginalia in the Middle Series)

Birds Born of Humans is a part of the 3D Commentary project (in progress) in which I concretize, investigate, attend to, and comment on subjects whose lives and agencies are occluded by the texts that claim to classify them. Turning these entities, creaturely, or otherwise, into solid stuff, they are repositioned from the margins to the center of the page, thus challenging the taxonomical gaze and their own barely visible legibility. This repositioning (making this project part of the larger Marginalia in the Middle Series of works) nods to the subversive qualities of medieval manuscript illumination, and at times draws from some of the medieval iconography itself. Birds Born of Humans, as a particular example of the 3D Commentary project, refers to a case discussed in the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Niddah 26b) of a woman who expels (or miscarries) a “raven likeness.”