Neither Day Nor Night

The geographical location of Jerusalem – perched, as it is, on a high mountain at the cusp of the Judean Desert, with all its archaeological findings – has had a decisive impact on Yerushalmi’s new body of work. Yet these works do not depict a physical place, with a certain historical, political and geographic narrative, but a metaphysical one. This place/non-place in her paintings is intimately bound up with Israel as a whole: the topography, climate, light, color, textures, history, and archaeology of the Judean Desert are the filters through which the images of the exhibition and its spectrum of colors were formulated. Yerushalmi explores a host of findings from ancient cultures and functional artifacts identified with traditional crafts, but her images shift from the realistic to the imaginary, from the functionality of craft to the mysticism of surrealism. Her personal imagery becomes a collective repository of images that links together nature and culture: an image becomes a symbol, a symbol becomes an archetype, an archetype becomes a myth.