Pleasantvale

This exhibition combines digitally enhanced colour photographs and recorded telephone conversations. The photographs were taken in August 2002, during a visit to the artist’s childhood town.

This exhibition combines digitally enhanced colour photographs and recorded telephone conversations. The photographs were taken in August 2002, during a visit to the artist’s childhood town. The conversations were recorded only later, upon returning to Jerusalem. Pleasantvale is a housing project for retired residents.
This little community is something of an anomaly with its stuccoed exteriors and manicured lawns divided by narrow concrete walkways.
It appears to the outsider a bubble of serenity frozen in time. Pleasantvale, emblematic of a more distant decade, here facilitates an imagined escape.
Despite the tangibility of place and the very real relationships developed between the artist and the residents, an aftertaste of illusion dominates the works.
Nostalgia plays an important role here – it is expressed in an almost desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past or a lost reality.
In this particular instance, nostalgia is not a past that has been experienced (by the artist) but rather the past as imagined or idealized through memory and desire.
Pleasantvale seems more distant and stranger than ever, and the ensuing conversations finalize the dissonance.