translation:
Review of the exhibition White States at the Design Center, Holon
April 2002
By Angela Levine
Installations rather than single objects, white rather than colored pieces, these were the conditions stipulated for possible inclusion in a group exhibition curated by Tirza Y. kollton, later given the apt title of White States. Limits of space and budget whittled down her selection to the works of eight artists, almost all of them active on the freewheeling edge of contemporary ceramics.
At least two installations relate to the kind of feminist topics that received exhaustive treatment in the art of the last two decades. Binyamina Nadler Naor's modest but captivating work illustrates the (outdated?) male perception of women as decorative sex objects. She makes her point by exhibiting serial images of female nudes, resembling paper cuts, whose bodies she ornaments with tiny beads, ribbons and high-heeled shoes.
The threat of male domination, or perhaps the general idea of brute force menacing a weaker party, underlies the grim scenario created by Varda Yatom. Here, a posse of formally suited men (each figure cast from the same mould) encircles a shrouded figure lying on a marriage bower alias a funeral bier. Coils of black wire emanating from the men's bodies connect up to the exposed hands and feet of their supine "victim."
Yatom's work is not the only one to suggest impending danger. Take, for example, Nama Ori Lichtner and Daphna Yalon's floor piece inspired by a recent journey to India. Constructed from plaster, dung and ready-made materials, it consists of mud-like terrain surrounding a primitive homestead. From listening to a prepared sound track, one gathers that Lichtner and Yalon, like Pooh Bear in the classic children's story, are searching for a place to call their home. But this viewer was struck by another aspect of their work; the threat posed by the miniature wild animals that Lichtner and Yalon have sited around their new and laboriously constructed home.
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Leonid Gossin's mixed media offering, "Memorial to a Blind Leader," illustrates the weakness of a certain type of conceptual art that cannot be appreciated without explanation. Coming unbriefed to this work, what can one understand from the strange title (apparently reflecting Gossin's own indecisiveness in finding his way through life), or of a sculpture in which ceramic objects - a man's shirt and a crow plucking at a human heart - are set upon an inverted lavatory bowl?
Verses by Gossin printed at the base of the sculpture give some indication of his theories. Among them, the concept that man loses his personal freedom and individuality in return for fulfilling his obligations to society, which may include the ultimate sacrifice.
A sense of entrapment, of precarious balance is projected by Catch 2002, Marcelle Klein's pristine installation in which three large wheel-thrown (unfired) pebbles are caught in a ceiling-strung net; while the frailty of all living things is poignantly illustrated in Angels of Earth and Heaven, Miri Fleischer's admirable collection of fragile winged figures and forms.
Completing this exhibition is a video documentation of a live performance by Orna Millo. She is seen coating huge panes of glass with wide bands of liquid porcelain, then incising letters and shapes into this viscous surface before soaping the glass clean. This process is repeated. Millo's performance could be interpreted as a feminist message focusing on the unrewarding nature of domestic tasks. But the obsessive character and barren endpoint of her endeavors are also part of the overall aura of an exhibition in which the majority of works are persuasive expressions of national anxieties and tensions.
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