| Shalom begins with a field of black brushwork layered over white—a visual base shared with the denim and canvas works. Across this surface, jagged division lines echo the logic of butcher diagrams, segmenting the page into compartments of difference. Some sections remain empty. Others are filled with fragments: a partial excerpt from the Bible, a child eating a sandwich from square 36 of Chutes and Ladders, and a stylized image of a woman on the telephone.
The biblical text, partially obscured, evokes divine instruction—its fragmentation suggesting the difficulty of extracting clarity from inherited doctrine. The child from Chutes and Ladders represents moral consequence rendered as gameplay: reward through obedience, setback through misbehavior. And the woman on the telephone becomes a symbol of spiritual outreach—communication as longing, ritual, or confession.
The title, Shalom, invokes the Hebrew concept of peace—not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of wholeness, harmony, and divine alignment. Here, that ideal is fractured. The diagram divides what shalom seeks to unify. Each section becomes a moral vignette, a symbolic echo of belief systems that promise unity but operate through segmentation.
In the context of New Morality, Shalom critiques the way spiritual and cultural systems divide the sacred into digestible parts. It stages peace not as a given, but as a pursuit—one that must navigate doctrine, nostalgia, and mediated connection.
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