What else can you offer the earth, which has everything?
What else can you give but something of yourself?
A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes home.

(Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Sacred Bouquet forges new ways to step back into a similar space of community care through ritual and rest, offering audiences a sensual, secular route to accessing the ritual framework of Sukkot. Sacred Bouquet is the New Mexico debut of the four-channel video installation and sound bath of the same name, originally commissioned from Mira Burack by Los Angeles-based Bridge Projects and featuring contributions from Jason Janusch, Rachel Shuman and others. Debuting alongside this presentation of Burack’s meditative procession is a series of new collage works that continue the artist's practice of creating assemblage works from repeated motifs in her domestic environment.

Sukkot serves as a celebration of joy through the unity of shared history and is partially observed through the construction and occupation of a four-walled outdoor structure, called a sukkah, and activation of a ritual bouquet, often called the arba'a minim in Hebrew. The four Middle-Eastern plants grouped together in most Sukkot settings are replaced with Burack’s chosen Southwestern counterparts – the yucca, juniper, prickly pear and piñon – as the four walls of the sukkah expand into the high desert environment, acknowledging the importance of ecological health in enabling human celebration. Through engaging with Sacred Bouquet, Burack invites viewers to immerse themselves in an actionable, enmeshed dynamic between community and landscape, offering a chance to sit and rest, cradled by the luscious, rose-tinted desert landscape.

Mira Burack is an artist living in the mountains of New Mexico. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Pepperdine University. Burack was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up on the coast of Maine.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Cue Art Foundation in New York City, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Mexico Museum of Art, 516 Arts, Muskegon Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, Media Knox Gallery in Slovenia, Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada, Kunstverin Wolfsburg in Germany, among others. She has lectured, taught workshops, and was a faculty member at the College for Creative Studies. She received a Community + Public Arts Detroit grant for The Edible Hut, a community space with a living edible roof, and was selected for the 2020 Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Burack spends her time learning from the high desert landscape, making, and enjoying her family.