Happy Life, Nylon Bags

Leah Zarembo’s people appear on paper, plywood, linen and glass. Their powerful presence emits smell, texture, longing, pain and love.

Leah’s art often describes the people in the “Mahane Yehuda” Market in Jerusalem and the dynamics of Jerusalem’s streets. Her work captures everyday moments. They combine daily scenes of Mideast life, influences of Christian iconography, Russian culture, political texts and human rights motifs. Her characters migrate between countries, perform varied religious ceremonies and live in mixed cultures and languages.

Leah integrates Russian folklore with Zionist history to create views of reality which she presents with ironic humor and a naive eye. She uses old painting techniques, mixing pigments with soil together with parts of her life experience.

Joel Kantor has walked the streets of Israel gathering stories that he comes upon by chance. Open-mouthed fish appear to be drowning, children held as in Michelangelo’s Pieta, people with their baskets pass in the marketplace, a shining young face in a rainy window. The stories expose local aesthetics, collective traditions, cultures and beliefs. They also describe personal and intimate situations.

Leah Zarembo and Joel Kantor collect portraits of a culture. They seize human moments and emphasize their relevance in life’s journey. Intrigued by the invisible, the silent, the unexpected and the marginal, they enable the ugly, the threatening, the ordinary and the seductive to coexist as layers of human and social existence; a portrait of a city and an expression of their own selves.