New Members 2012 – New Friendship

In the courtyard, near Debbie Margalit’s studio lay a rabbit in a cage beside a blooming orchid. A rabbit next to an orchid. Debbie’s was the first of our mutual studio visits.

Our chance meeting as three new members of The Association for Jerusalem Artists presented a challenge. Do we share an underlying common language, despite the age differences and the varied materials and techniques we each employ?

After visiting one another in our studios and discussing our work, we discovered interesting communalities. Some of these connections are embodied in the works exhibited here in three one-woman shows.

The three of us are studio artists. For each of us, the studio constitutes a space that compels us to engage in the routine of making art. Spending time in the studio facilitates close observation and lends itself to prolonged processes

The physical encounter with materials, whether paint, charcoal, clay, plaster, string or fur—the actual sensory contact, the touch, the proximity of the hand, the smell—is crucial for each of us. This is expressed through various means, be it the sensitivity of paint application in the paintings of Debbie Margalit, the tactile undertaking in Maya Muchawsky Parnas’s work, or the expansion of the boundaries of material in my own work.

Each artist uses her own means to contend with an internal and somewhat domestic space and refers to familiar objects that have an intimate history.
Debbie Margalit is exhibiting large drawings of wood charcoal, created under conditions of natural light, and without employing a fixative. She depicts an armchair in which she nursed her babies as a young mother. The chair was collected from a New York City street, brought back to Israel with the family, and was later moved from home to the studio. This intimate piece of furniture appears repeatedly in her work. Margalit persistently strives to unravel the relationships existing within the studio space.
Maya Muchawsky Parnas is showing an impression of a carpet cast in plaster. The original carpet was hand made by her grandmother and grandfather. It was a childhood gift that her grandparents brought to Israel during a visit from their home in Columbia. Since then it cushioned her room from childhood to adulthood. She chose to represent the reverse side of the carpet. In the casting process Muchawsky Parnas captures the memory of the joint handicraft of her grandparents, as well as the residues of time and matter.
In my exhibition, the natural woolen coats that are stretched into a tent with sagging linings, were worn by my mother and my maternal grandmother here in Israel. Beside the tent lay porcelain dogs on bear and sheep furs, taken from winter coats that belonged to my paternal grandmother and grandfather who were killed in the Holocaust.
Magnetic letters are fastened to a metal plate forming the sentence:
“I’m not handy nor do I have good taste”
The aesthetic tension expressed in the phrase good taste serves as a thought-provoking foundation for the future of our New Friendship.