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Liberty (leading the people), by Dorit Cypis, borrows elements
from her recent installation The Sound of Time, (Optica Gallery,
Montreal, Canada, 2003), and extends them to adapt to the current
environment of Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Liberty (leading the people), a reflection on Eugene Delacroix's
romantic/classical painting Liberty Leading the People, 1830,
is a poetic evocation of longing, loss and mourning.all inner
emotions associated with unrequited desire for freedom, a "freedom"
seemingly within reach and inevitably beyond our reach. It is
a desire which propels human beings no matter what our cultural
heritage, no matter what our gender, class and race lines.
At Noga, all the elements placed in the gallery, the architecture
and the viewers reference each other. Two images, one still, the
other in movement, and a mirror on the floor all share the same
proportions. The still image, a photograph cut out from the Los
Angeles Times in 2001, has been transformed to destabilize its
political intention into one evoking a personal memory of mythological
proportions. Whose memory? Whose history? The image in movement,
a video projection of curtains caught in a fierce gale negotiating
the containment of a window frame, is relentless in its physicality,
bodyfull in its movement and motivation to be free. The curtains
hang in a hotel room, Tel Aviv, Israel. The mirror, reflecting
there where it is not, catches dislocated glances of everything
present within the architectural space of the gallery. Glances,
which are seen only by the viewer's moving body, make the viewer
complicit in the act of looking.
While in Israel, as compliment to her exhibition at Noga Gallery,
Cypis will be spending time observing the conciliation strategies
at play in the Palestinian/ Israeli village of Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam.
These concurrent activities will inform the future expansion of
Liberty (leading the people) for the upcoming exhibition Imagine
a Nation, 2004, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Project room: Eli Zafran
Gaps - Displacements
A lack of ability to contain a given urban space is central to this
sequence
of prints.
Such arbitrary space is obviously condensed in map guides suggesting a
fractal orientation in various parts of a city.
The sequence is not an attempt of mapping an actual city, however it
realizes vaguely sites, moment views that deconstruct to fragments the
syntax of the texture of the city.
Similarly to maps, these photos contain no human figures, practically
shifting sights of certain places elsewhere.
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Dorit Cypis ,Detail
from installation, 2003
Dorit Cypis ,Detail
from installation, 2003
Dorit
Cypis ,Detail from installation, 2003
Screen print, oil on phosphorus, 73x48cm., 2003
Screen
print, oil on phosphorus, 73x48cm., 2003
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