New Members 2015

It is an established tradition at the Artists’ House, to welcome new members
of The Association for Jerusalem Artists every year and thus, to open the year’s exhibition season. This year, three artists are joining the association: Noa Brezner, Hadassa Goldvicht and Netanel Morhan. Pinpointing any links or similarities between the artists exhibiting is quite a challenge.

Their separate oeuvres vary and span from personal-biographic, through social-political and finally, the concrete here and now. Nonetheless, it is an opportunity to experience parts of their oeuvre and different modes of practice.

Noa Brezner | At Present

Tattered and worn thin, drained by reckless indiscriminant use, is the word “space.” Any mention of it here will be with great care for the nastiest foe of any creative process, writing a curatorial text included, is what is so familiar that it has lost all impact. Whilst the word has been exhausted in texts about art, it remains abstract and somewhat vague, a trait that may contributes to it exploitation. In any case, we no longer sense the gravity of its meaning, its echoing onomatopoeic potency. We do not wonder “what is space?”, “Such is the way of the world: words rise to glory and others descend to commonality.” (H.N. Bialik, Revealment and Concealment in Language)

Exhibition spaces share a similar fate. The eyes of the visitors seek out the works of art adorning them and overlook the walls, ceiling, the panels, electrical fixtures. Of course, we must tell the significant from the inconsequential. We accept some basic concepts upfront, as components of a language and a norm. At times, only the strangest defamiliarization can call our attention to those slight nuances in a space – the way a wall meets the floor, the texture of these two surfaces, a slanted beam of light tying them together… To the delicate sounds of these, Noa Brezner’s camera acts as amplifier. She isolates faint murmurs and echoes them in the space. The reverberation restores measure, dimensions and attributes, big and small. In presence of these works, we may contemplate that composition which slices and dices parts of the world and destines them separately. We may be present.

What indeed is space if not the place left for presence?

Hadassa Goldvicht | Poems

The senses have a pace of their own. They cut and measure the world into rational portions, preventing it from overwhelming us. This pace is that by which we discover the new, its many facets and components cannot be revealed at once. The beat of an eyelash, the time it takes to read, to utter a word, to dig up an image, is the time it takes us to uncover the new.

Thus too, in the way we read a text written by another. The words roll in our mouths as we lap them up one by one. We introduce them to our bodies, all their memories and tastes. Any such encounter generates a text that is entirely new.

In “Poems,” Hadassa Goldvicht bequeaths her poems, highly personal, to the staff at The Jerusalem Artists’ House to read out on camera. The result is screened simultaneously and the densely meaningful words unburden and scatter their load, the impact between body and text.

The contents of the Artists’ House are ever-changing. Like any exhibition space,
it welcomes new artists and displays constantly. The space is run by The Jerusalem Artists Association and represents it and therefore, accepts new members annually, a welcoming containing receptacle of sorts. Regarding its staff, the people who facilitate its activity, is therefore a means of addressing the longed for sense of containment through its human aspect. Like words surging through a host body or the works of art entering the space, the work embodies a fundamental wish to be accepted. It is a site-specific work that explores the human relationships between the artist and The Artists’ House staff; can they offer Goldvicht a safe harbor?

Netanel Morhan | Apart from Body

It is ironic that descriptions of “out-of-body” experiences often require an image of the body itself, departing its physical counterpart. Body and experience are so strongly intertwined in our minds, that trying to paint the experience demands the ghostly image as a substitute. We are left with two impossible to discern. They are often differentiated by representing one as bound by the laws of physics and the other free of them. Is the spirit escaping the body indeed free and unbound?

The protagonists of the surrealist paintings by Netanel Morhan reside in high altitudes, in coolly lit spaces that seem soundly insulated from the toxic world below. Dystopia ravages the world outside the aquarium that is an office or a penthouse in the New York City skyscraper. Within, neither the figures nor their spirits seem able to escape. They are both trapped in a gilded cage, discussing their fate.

The paintings are masterfully done, deriving from hyper-real painting and romanticism. Like romantic heroes, those portrayed in the paintings are alone, searching their souls for a remedy to their unrest. Layers upon layers of glass embody degrees of separation between them and the object of their desire. Light cascading from these smooth surfaces tricks the eye and illuminates the question, what is real and what is but its image?