Memoire de l'avenir Gallery, Paris

Tracing Oblivion - Group Exhibition

Verdi Bobrow, Arie Berkowitz, Talia Yemini, Ayelet Amrani Navon, Yael Atzmony.

 

Opening: Friday, 02/20/2015

 

What is memory if not an existing trace or sign of bygone event, and what is forgetfulness (oblivion) if not the absence of this trace or sign.
 Symbolically therefore, the attempt to track and record the 'thing' in the physical world is an attempt to record something that was erased or forgotten - tracing oblivion.
Following the past, the traces, the story, becoming the follower of one's self in a place you will never reach.  Like points over the time lines that became an experiential sketch.

 

The exhibition features art work in a variety of mediums by five artists living and working in Israel. Works that attempt to mark a place and represent memory. The works in the exhibition refer to outlines and non concrete landscapes, landscapes of memory. And attempts to study the term landscape, the landscape as a place of longing and feelings.

Some of the artists are dealing with their family history, and others are engaged in the structure and shape of urban architecture, imagined or fabricated.

The works are monochromatic, the platforms are taken from daily life, ready-mades and scraps and parts that are generally considered as irrelevant or non functional any longer. The color scale of the works ranges from absolute black to the natural color. In each of the works one can see the attempt of interpretation and exploration of sub-conscious places. maybe places that we might not have access to on a daily basis.

 

Talia Yemini Hamidrasha School of Art graduate and young artist, uses old maritime navigation maps disused, that belonged to her father, who was a captain. She uses it as  a platform of new maps in black and white. On the original outline routes, she produces new imaginative lands, and thus points to the liquidity of the boundaries of reality and how we divide and define the world.

 

Verdi Bobrow, a graduate of the Hamidrasha School of Art, investigates three concepts: duration, accumulation and transformation. On industrial paper rolls she paints / records / gaining a large density of thin lines that form a mass of material converged and color that consolidate to an image of landscape outline view.
With a view of the cumulative brushes storks landscape in her paintings, Bobrow examines, with a different perspective and a different medium, a different view, a different landscape.

 

Arie Berkowitz, lecturer in art and design, produces abstract sculpture from parts of wood and remnants of industrial parts, remnants of life and presents a group of sculptures depicting daily materials architectural structures and poetic registration of an urban city.

 

Ayelet Amrani Navon, sculptor and painter, has created objects from piano parts and parchment paper, will present objects and paintings dealing with childhood memories and myth.
Yael Atzmony, An artist working mainly in ceramics and lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art, will present a video-work depicting a journey of an anonymous female figure that is sailing in a boat, her journey passes inside underground water canals. The scene present two parallel universes operate simultaneously and represent the elevated world and the world of darkness, maybe a symbolic journey into the domain of the unconsciousness.

 

Materials that have lost their validity and functionality, memories that have faded away, are revived. The works extract from obscurity materials and memories, trying to produce new documentation, just before the dissolution and the inevitable erasure and sometimes brutal process, of memory and oblivion.

 

- January 2015 Vera Pilpoul