Echoes of a Peacock’s Tail

Shay Arick’s works operate within a sustained state of in-betweenness. They do not come together into a dramatic climax, but insist on lingering, repetition, and friction, on dragging and subtle shifts. Despite their delicacy, however, they are charged with the full force of reality.

The sculptural gesture does not enclose form, but rather holds it loosely.  The materials installed in the gallery converge and separate. The sequence sheds and assumes form in accordance with the viewer’s movement through the space. A visit to the exhibition is, therefore, not an experience of viewing, but of encounter—an event of creation. The walking pace amid the pipes becomes the rhythm of the image’s formation and dissolution.

The work as a whole thus becomes a fragile body that coalesces as it disperses, disperses as it coalesces. It is a human body that emerges in space not as a whole, but as an array of tensions and relations between glass, clamps, peacock feathers, pipes, and leaves. As in reality, nothing exists in isolation. All becoming is reciprocal. A continuous action. Existence itself unfolds “on the threshold,” a fleeting flash at the convergence of space and time.

Arick’s​ artistic act does not seek to leave a heroic imprint. Instead, it offers a memory or an echo that endures even after the image itself is no longer present. It invites us to listen attentively to the dim murmurs of matter, and to yield to the feeble trace we all leave in our passage through time: a vibration of sound that lingers briefly, even after its source has vanished.

Smadar Schindler

Events in the exhibition:

• Saturday 14.3 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Shay Arick & Smadar Schindler
• Wednesday 18.4 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Shay Arick & Smadar Schindler