AND NOW - ZEMACK CONTEMPORARY ART 2018
And Now - Solo exhibition at Zemack Contemporary Art
10 May - 15 June 2018
Curator: Netta Eshel
A Letter to Lee
“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” – Donald W. Winnicott
Through this encounter, you generously allow me to take part in the formulation of your own story, sprawling out into the gallery space. Here, the two video works are projected in an intimate space and fuse into one piece. Thoughts about connections and disconnections in your work stem from your actual working process: you extract images from your video works and you freeze their movement, allowing the viewer to linger just a little more, to control time.
“…as spectator: I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I retard, in order to have time to know at last.” -
Roland Barthes
The suspension of the moment is carried out without the ability to predict any final outcome; like the student from the Zen story who tries to paint a sea wave and only reaches perfect accuracy at the point of release – when in a moment of frustration, he throws the brush at the wall. The freed movement summoned the outcome that felt right to him.
This is how I understand the creation process of the large emulsion works, developed in a dark room where you disconnect from time and reality. You grasp the moment just like the hand that sometimes succeed in catching a flower but fails to retain the particles of memory. The image’s creation process in full darkness unveils and reveals a photograph that is unique in its essence, existing independently of any sequence.
“The photographic image is full, crammed: no room, nothing can be added to it.” “Motionless, the Photograph flows back from presentation to retention.” - Roland Barthes
When I connect your works from different periods into a journey through the gallery space, I discover that your language hasn’t changed. It is continuous, like the reading of Roland Barthes’ book that you have lent me, marked like a road map full of arrows pointing to your path. I draw a line between Pina Bausch’s Hands Solo – a new video piece created out of an early work, Coffee With Pina – to the hands in your latest piece And Now, failing to hold on to grains of sand. The image of the hands brings to mind the works of Gabriel Orozco and Richard Serra: a hand can hold time and produce new material forms, it can get wounded in its attempt to grasp metal objects, and it can let go of the sand gleaming in the light of an artificial moon. Perhaps through this movement we will feel the sand entering our eyes and let go of our yearning for perfect vision. In that precise moment of yielding and stepping out of the limits of reason, we start seeing all that we have been hiding; a ghost bursts out from within, the familiar becomes foreign, the line between imagination and reality gets blurred, clearing the way for the return of the repressed.
I go back to the opening text: Winnicott's statement about the artist torn between the need to communicate and the need to be hidden instigated my desire to create a lexicon of my own fragments, from my own worlds; fragments that are both luminous and hidden, and connect to your unique and inspiring world. A world in which the body expresses the secret language of the soul.
Netta Eshel, Curator, May 2018