In his new exhibition “Carrots & Refreshments”, Amikam Toren will show two new series of video works from the years 2008-2009, a sculpture, and paintings from the series “Armchair paintings”.

About the videos: Twelve stories, strangely moving tales touched with humour, edged with the surreal. True stories, narratives of experience from the artist’s life, selected from a period of 40 years.

The precision of observation and the almost casual, natural humanity are arresting but, while the narratives themselves are deeply affecting, their form as voice-overs to fixed camera films of the scene of their occurrence has a powerful impact on our perception of location. Background and foreground, setting and story, softly change places as our listening and viewing shift as impulses to imagination.

Six short tales assembled into a seventeen minute anthology of acute reflection.

In Toren’s work the most elemental form or mundane object has its very material redeployed to suck out hidden meaning. It’s an alchemical process: a little assistance, a redistribution of resources, is all that is required to reveal the energy and significance contained within dull matter. Object, sign, experience, each and every casually accepted, and more often discarded, mundanity is open to challenge, transformation and adjustment, teasing out truths beyond its basic nature. In this exhibition, short deadpan videos, paintings and the orange peel sculpture are revealed as harbingers of formal and fanciful delight