Still at the Landscape

Still at the Landscape is the first solo exhibition of the photographer Andrew Gluzman. Landscape, desert environment and human intervention on an abandoned territory are the focus of his artistic process, expressed in photography.
Gluzman, a graduate of the photography department in Bezalel Art College, immigrated to Israel in 1995 from Kyrgyzstan, situated near the Chinese border of the former CIS, and settled in Dimona. The exhibition spotlights a series of landscape photographs taken at the edge of the third continent, in the town of Chaiten, situated in south Chile, on the way to Patagonia. Chaiten used to be a lively resort until it was almost destroyed completely within two days, by the nearby volcano eruption.The exhibition reveals clear, almost surgical records of “selected” scenes from the distorted landscape. It captures live scenes as iconic representations of the post-disaster painful encounters between the remains of human creations and the power of nature. Gray silt of the volcano is carried away from Chaiten by the stream. It drowns small buildings, isolates them, leaving a single roof in a wasteland of ash or remains of a ruined little house protruding above its surface. In front of the camera, collection of ruins turns into an exposition of objects put in artificial, theatrical positions.In his exhibition, Gluzman seeks to look at the tragedy from an aesthetical point of view: has the destruction of the abandoned city created chaos or beauty? How does it manifest a year after the disaster? During his long stay in Chaiten, the artist’s attitude to the destroyed landscape has changed, and he began to see the aesthetical aspect of inanimate nature.