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W i l d A n g e l s The garden is beautiful in a mysterious, abstract way. It does not seem to facilitate life within its perimeter, where angels with male Slavic features and translucent wings cross an icy landscape that breeds skull-shaped, possibly poisonous fruit (figure 3). The garden in this series is simultaneously a locus of desire and the focus of traumatic memory. Art historian Jill Bennett emphasizes that trauma-related art, whether rooted in individual or collective memory, is not necessarily “about” trauma but rather, “enact[s] the … experience of post-traumatic memory,” which is “resolutely an issue of the present.” 1 Regarded in this perspective, Nogah Engler’s eerie angels invite us to share an entire generation’s post- trauma, albeit from a safe distance and through the protection of a veil of frost. "Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing" (Ezekiel 3:12). A gust of heavenly wind grips the prophet Ezekiel and carries him to the Judean exiles on the rivers of Babylon. In Wild Angels , Nogah Engler gropes for hold in the midst of the storm that has shattered the world in dark historical times. And while her angels remain trapped in the frozen garden, Engler compellingly reaffirms the powers of life and beauty through the very process of transforming them into art. 1 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art , Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 2005, 40. Figure 3: Nogah Engler, Landscape #1 , from the series Uplift , 2020