September 10, 2004
In
Uncategorized
September 10, 2004
In
Uncategorized
joshua borkovsky | notebook #2 the haji paintings
December 2, 2004
In
Ill Pull the sky down for you
In the current series of works, Maiberg brings together the objects of her paintings of the last ten years. Her paintings examine the boundaries between truth and illusion, portraits and landscapes, the internal and external, dreams and reality, the signifier and the signified.
For Maiberg, longings are processed into something lost in Tel-Aviv, lost in time. The process travels and takes place in the gap between photography and painting. The landscape and the figures come from the family photo-album, or are taken in the present by Maiberg herself. This is realist painting reacting to life in a direct and personal manner. Thematically, Maiberg corresponds with one of the fascinating directions in contemporary discourse preoccupied with images of reality: the connection between photography and painting, in the space between life and art where everyday activity turns into an act of art.
Time is frozen in photography and painting, very present yet longs for something different, different days. The aim of painting as raw material is to put together “facts,” “memories,” and “moments;” to confront situations and places and bring them to the surface, to consciousness. This is where past and present dissolve into one another: Orly Maiberg with her father on the beach; Maiberg’s children on the beach; Tel-Aviv of the past; Tel-Aviv of the present. If in earlier works her figures were anonymous, without identity, then in the current series of works the figures receive a concrete characterization, personal and familial.
Orly Maiberg has developed in the last decade a unique and independent outlook on nature and urban nature. This outlook is distinct, uncompromising. Her estuarine landscapes are one of the most impressive achievements of the young painting in Israel. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her works have been presented in museums, galleries and art-fairs in Israel, the US and Europe.
October 21, 2004
In
Walking Distance
Talia Keinan / Walking Distance
Opening: 21/10/2004 Closing: 23/11/2004
The exhibit consists of video works and drawing sketches, where the video pieces are presented as sculptural objects which, along with the sound emerging from them, create the space within they are set.
Drawn with pencil on black gouache, the landscape piece, created from the artist’s imagination inspired by two sources: the first being silver kitsch-style pictures depicting ideal places, usually fantasized locations inexistent in reality, and the second source of inspiration were Israel landscape photographs. The light projected on the drawing accompanied by the sound of a passing-by vehicle exposes the landscape itself and the spectrum of coloring variations within the monochromatic drawing.
The round hole projected on the wall was photographed on an afternoon in a public garden in Tel Aviv – it remains unedited.
The fountain, an abandoned table on which plastic cups and plates are left unattained yet the water continues to flow as a living and vibrant unit, unresolved.
All of these elements in the gallery space, along with the sketches hung dispersedly on the walls, together create fragments of the same place, a physical or mental walking distance from each other, liquid and subjective; one passes from kitsch to disaster, from beginning to a deserted plateau.
Talia Keinan (b. 1978), is currently a student in the Bezalel M.F.A program in Tel Aviv. An honors graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2003, she also participated in the student exchange program in New York at S.V.A. In 2003 she had a solo exhibit in the Herzeliya Museum of Art and is winner of the Givon Prize for 2004. This is the first exposure of her works held at Noga Gallery.
September 2, 2004
In
Ghost
Ori Gersht / Ghost
Opening: 02/09/2004 Closing: 10/10/2004
For the making of this work I spent a lot of time in the Galilee, among trees that were over 500 years old and more. The olive trees have got a unique significance – they symbolise the bond between the farmer and his ancestors and the land. For that reason they are at the forefront of the current territorial disputes.
I took the photographs at midday, when the bright and bleaching sun was hovering in mid sky. I over exposed the film by many stops, allowing the harsh and violent sun to attack the film and melt the images of the trees.
Later in the darkroom I attempted to rescue the details and the traces from the over exposed and therefore dense negatives. In contrast to the violent and destructive act of exposure the images that appeared on the paper were frail, delicate and gentle.
June 25, 2004
In
Calling
Bettina Bach / Calling
Opening: 25/06/2004 Closing: 30/07/2004
Bettina Bach has built her own universal in which the description “wordless” is of great importance. Her world is made out of harmony and peace of mind where every verbal or textual description would harm the complex-intimate atmosphere she creates. (Actual Art, Jan. 2003).
The objects that Bettina Bach uses are “simple everyday things found on the street, at the bottom of drawers, the last threads off the spool. Leftovers from the market, from around the house, the remains of memory and existence”. (Alissa Walser, Collagene Fragmente). The composition of all elements creates an atmosphere of reminiscence.
The concrete transform to something volatile, elusive. Bach is fascinated by unexpected situations which results are surprising. By unplanned process she creates a “world” full of associations; the components of installation are unified, consolidated and directed by the nature of the space.
May 13, 2004
In
New Works
Gilad Efrat / New Works
Opening: 13/05/2004 Closing: 18/06/2004
Gilad Efrat – Works 2004
Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armor of an enemy knight.
After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (1)
The exhibition is held in three spaces:
The display window: through a slit in the covered window a self-portrait painting can be seen; the main room: a group of works in various dimensions, all oil pastel on paper. The small room upstairs: three paintings, oil on linen, depicting Ansaar Prison after a photograph by Roi Kuper (Roi made a series of images of the prison in April 2002).
In the territorial games of the gallery space, images of the prison are squeezed into a small backroom. Images charged with political and public meaning simultaneously demonstrate the power of the concrete space, and the mental prison: a labyrinth of restrained expressivity.
In contrast with this space, the oil pastels express yet more persuasively the expansion of mass when it grips concrete images, a kind of faceless body, a type of realistic look at a fragment, a piece of skin, or a peek into the inner body.
The images of the prison do not let go, and like an open eye in the gallery space, they give silent witness to the symbiotic relationship between private and public space.
(1) The story is taken from Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso.
February 12, 2004
In
Crimes of the Heart
Marilou Levin / Crimes of the Heart
Opening: 12/02/2004 Closing: 20/03/2004
The name of Marilou Levin’s new exhibition is taken from the play “Crimes – Heart” (by Beth Henley, 1979). At the core of the play are the confessions of Babe, the protagonist of the play, which describes a failed marriage, her romance with a 15 year-old black boy and her attempts to murder her husband when the romance is discovered. For the first time in her life Babe tries to connect with her true feelings.
In the exhibition, the video work “Crimes of the Heart” shows Marilou Levin playing the role of Babe continuously repeating the story of the attempted murder. The play deals with social norms, issues of choice, and the ability to maintain freedom of choice in the face of social norms and demands. These are questions that have appeared throughout Levin’s work, to mention a few, “I have expectations”, I’m happy for you”, “go home”, and more.
In a sophisticated connection between the worlds of childhood and adulthood – expressed for example by an innocent portrait of Pooh Bear that is turned into a female bear lying on her back, honey dripping from between her legs, a swarm of bees feed off her vulva – Levin reveals erotic, animal elements, even in seemingly innocent situations. From this cynical, ironic, dryly humorous standpoint childhood memories, parent-child relations, male-female relations are examined.
The exhibition includes a series of eleven black and white photographs, video, and oil paintings on different supports.
January 2, 2004
In
Intercontinental
Atsmon Ganor / Intercontinental
Opening: 02/01/2004 Closing: 06/02/2004
INTERCONTINENTAL
In ‘Intercontinental’ Atsmon Ganor exhibits two types of works – a large video projection of his animation: ‘Multiple Heads’ (Canada, 2002. 16.19 minutes in a seamless loop), and a series of more than 30 map assemblages. These were created from the pages of the Yedioth Aharonot Atlas that was published in the 60’s. The maps were distributed to the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper readers in the weekend issues as a promotion that maintained an educational aspect: “know the world.”
In a series of simple acts of cutting, tearing, creasing and folding Ganor re-assembles the maps. He creates a fictional, 3 dimensional topography: a new hybrid world that is born from a mixing up of borders and geological formations. Suggesting the utopian and the catastrophic, these topographical landscapes appear as a marvel and at the same time as an unsettling event – as an expression of inner restless tectonic forces and folds. The ‘mountains-lumps’, the ‘island-humps’, the ‘continent-growths’, from a distant horizon, send an echo of the topography of the human body, without being mimetic.
The acts of folding and creasing are translated in the animation ‘Multiple Heads’ to a curved narrative; one that conjoins the sensual with the disturbing and the ridiculous with the poetic. In various scenes, violence and tenderness appear as two faces of one coin. They determine the ‘psyche’ of this piece: a superimposition of political, physical and mental borders in a constant exchange that involves both a conflict and consolation.
The spatial and territorial is transformed from one scene to another. The flat surface of the screen or the lines of the geographical map change to become a sensual/sexual interiority, or an abyssal depth. The ground seems as an elusive element. It is constantly established and destroyed in the conjunction between reality and fantasy. Space is emphasized not only by different lines of direction and movement, but also by the particular story lines. These involve absurd interactions between various images such as heads, body parts, animals, chains of mountains, geographical maps and words. The story lines delineate themselves in a rhizomatic manner. Splitting one from the other, multiplying in unpredictable directions, they make any moral or end impossible. Following the circular structure of Multiple Heads, the end point meets the point of origin. At this meeting point what is revealed is that the end is the origin.