Uzi Silber remembers a teacher from childhood asking him to judge when a particular painting was made. His estimate - 1947 - was off by more than five centuries: The work was made in 1380. "The flatness of the painting was very modernist," says Silber, a Manhattan painter and writer.

Decades later, the gap between perceived age and actual age still fascinates Silber and informs his work, which incorporates symbols from different ages and parts of the world, ranging from Phoenician idols to 1970s photographs. Twelve of Silber's large paintings will hang in his exhibit "Mann Makht und Gott Lakht: Man Makes, God Laughs," which will open Monday at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center's Deutser Art Gallery.

In a time that is increasingly defined by the swap of tangible objects for digital proxies, Silber's rummaging through mounds of discarded items is particularly noteworthy. The collector of atlases, stamps and ancient coins even has sought inspiration in a Staten Island dump.

"It was kind of smelly, but you see some very interesting things," he says. "I always looked at garbage dumps as latter-day archeological excavations. Today's dump is going to be fodder - an incredible treasure trove - for someone living 2,000 years from now."

When he mines the past and choreographs collapses of time in which the present speaks with the past, Silber draws somewhat on his Jewish schooling. "You can't take the yeshiva [religious school] out of the boy," he says.

Having shown this body of work in Jewish community centers in Baltimore; Hartford, Conn.; Philadelphia; and Tenafly, N.J., Silber doesn't worry about being typecast as a Jewish artist. "I don't care about being pigeonholed. I don't worry about it," he says, although he notes Jewish community centers tend to attract more foot traffic for their pools and gyms than they do for their galleries.

"I hope Houston will be different," Silber says.

Silber, who is self-trained and initially made a living painting and teaching bar mitzvah lessons on the side, says he has always found the Tanakh - the Hebrew bible - to be funny. That whimsical approach to biblical texts, as well as his study of the Talmud, an ancient Jewish legal work that also is referred to by the Aramaic name Gemara, informs his work.

"You really appreciate the Internet-ian features of Gemara, where you can have one guy who lived in the year 150 having a sort-of discussion with someone who lived in the year 370," he says.

That dialogue surfaces in Silber's acrylic painting "Masonry" (2010), which depicts above-ground and subterranean regions that evoke Fritz Lang's 1927 film "Metropolis." Above ground, what Silber describes as "some strange idol" - he uses the biblical Hebrew term avodah zara, or "strange worship" - pulls a convoy of images with ancient coins, some real and some invented, for wheels. One of the coins bears a fallout-shelter logo. Underground, a worker wearing a baseball cap tries to support some sort of scaffolding with a plunger while his colleagues work on other pipes.

It's a strange image, to say the least. The artist is even ready to call many of the elements strange. When he explains what the handymen are up to as the pageant processes above, Silber says, "who knows what they're doing down there?"

But content that isn't readily accessible and easily interpreted is part of the stuff of archaeological excavations, particularly in the dumps of history. Before creating these pieces, Silber worked in insurance at New York Life. "I started doing all of my sketches during the clearly boring meetings," he says, noting that he incorporates "corporate gobbledygook" into his work.

"The Leverage of Social Capital" (2012) is based on that bureaucratic jargon. Silber depicts a 1960s image of a woman with a conical hair dryer over her head. Other elements of the chaotic, colorful painting draw from Soviet realism murals and people bargaining over cows in an 18th-century marketplace, Silber explains. On the bottom of the painting, a rickety column and two thin telephone poles barely hold the scene up.

"I like the idea that if you take just one piece, the whole thing collapses," he says.

Menachem Wecker is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.