Davi Barell
In the pictorial backdrop usually seen on tourist websites, the artist plants photographs of structures he took in his environment. In an act of exposure and concealment, the artist creates a fantasy that goes beyond hollow and saccharine beauty. A fantasy of a place loaded with political conflicts and social gaps, where you could one day visit and enjoy without threat or fear. In this link between the local and the ideal, the contrast is emphatic in the intensity of light, the color scale and textures that comprise each. This is a visual link that enhances elements present in one and absent in the other.
Landscapes designed by men, or destroyed by them, lofty sites and those on the brink of collapse are together transformed into an image of a new and complex landscape.
Provenance
Misinformation and embedding of made-up content - "fake news" - has become the negative expression of unreliability. The fabricated and the genuine in both words and images have mixed and merged into a single reality. News updates, reports, and commentaries about events are presented together with false accusations and cover-ups. It is unclear where one ends and the other begins; the two are now inseparable. Photography, previously a principal witness, the tool for capturing moments of truth, has been transformed into the primary means in the subversion and manipulation of visibility. What used to be a testimonial to the moment, proof of transpiring events, is undermined and cast in doubt. This exhibition deals in the corrosion of visibility and the invention of reality by combining facts with fiction. The participating artists employ various techniques and engage in manipulations of materials that represent reality, those familiar and easily available, such as pictures, numbers, internet pics, archive photographs, or family albums. They extract images from these materials, re-edit them, and create a new reality - works of art. For this exhibition, I selected artists born and raised in Israel, all young artists active in the local art scene, connected to and influenced by this place, and who use their art to address burning issues of the national agenda. Curated By Ronit Eden
