SILVERLININGS

pewter

2025 - ongoing

Levine began Silverlinings in response to the Los Angeles Wildfires of 2025, where Levine lost her childhood home, her mother’s home of 30 years, among homes of many other friend’s and family. In it, she invites survivors of the fires to make a drawing of an object they lost and miss, into a sandbox. The drawing is then cast in pewter. Two castings are made, one for Levine’s growing project archive and the other for the participant.

Above images depict each set of castings (to date, dec 2025), before the pairs were split. Photos by Yubo Dong.

Installation views from Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, from exhibition Without End: Recent Work On Grief By Cara Levine, Nov 2025 - May 2026. Images by Andrea Lonas

Text excerpted from museum label:

Levine conceived of Silverlinings after the recent Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025, during which she lost her childhood home as well as the homes of several other members of her family. In an attempt to begin contending with the magnitude of this personal and collective loss, she invited individuals directly impacted by the fires to visit her studio to create a memory drawing in sand of an object that was either lost to the fire or that evokes a memory of their home. The objects are then cast twice in pewter, with the participants keeping one and contributing the other to the artist’s archive. On display in the gallery is the growing collection of cast memory drawings, the tools Levine uses to make them, and an invitation to collaborate on site in a similar practice. 

In the center of the gallery sits a large circular sandbox where visitors are invited to trace a drawing in the sand - by hand while kneeling or by dowel while standing – that relates to something or someone they are struggling with or grieving at this moment. Those who have experienced climate-related loss, are invited to return to the museum to trace in the sand contained by the triangular piece at an appointed time with Levine–a gesture towards Levine’s original impetus for the Silverlingings project. This action of commemoration carries an inherent tension where the simple and nostalgic activity of drawing in the sand allows for an embodied connection to a difficult feeling or experience.

Sand holds much meaning in Judaism, symbolizing growth and resilience, and a way to delineate a site for commemoration. Sand, chol in Hebrew, connotes both an emptiness and an expansiveness, it represents a boundlessness, a sense of the infinite - going and going - yet rooted in the materials of the earth. The act of kneeling at the sand evokes humility, ritual and devotion. Levine offers this action as a potential restorative process for those impacted by loss of any kind. The circular shape of the sandbox visualizes the whole of our grief, containing all types of losses, while the smaller segment is a slice of this whole that is set aside for loss brought on by climate disaster. While the drawing that one participant traces in the sand is impermanent and will likely be erased through continual interaction—its ghost will become part of the next and the next, as drawings accumulate over the run of the show. This balancing force gestures towards our shared experience and the potential for it to be held, lightly and tenderly, together. 

Various images from the process of making Silverlinings, 2025.