Walkway
Yanai Segal
Curator: Haftel Naveh Sally
31 Oct — 26 December, 2015
Yanai Segal’s exhibition, Walkway, does not presume to present a mimetic reality or a minimalistic scene of events. The exhibition is an attempt to create a conceptual space that envelops different worlds, and bridges a sensual experience with a transcendental universal space. Segal recruits the idea of the promenade as a mechanism and works it into the viewer’s physical experience, alongside a compilation of symbolically charged custom motifs, borrowed from the Israeli as well as Jewish repertoire (Hamsa and Menorah), indicating a spiritual experience.
Segal presents a site-specific installation that rethinks the exhibition space while
calling into question the conventions appertaining to the viewing and consumption of contemporary art. In the manner in which he directs the movement of viewers within the space, Segal wishes to examine the dynamics between the artwork and its “viewer – customer.” The works on display offer a reflective look at the aesthetics of local modernist architecture.
Large areas of the gallery floor are covered in gravel, marking a new path from one room to another, drawing the exhibition’s territorial continuity for the viewer.
The drawn path restricts and dictates the pace and flow of visitors through the installation, altering their perspective and rearticulating their relation to the work.
The paintings and reliefs featured in the exhibition linger on pattern and ornament, strategically utilizing repetition and reproduction. First and foremost, Segal is guided by a designer’s mode of thinking, devoid of a linear visual narrative, and aspires to aesthetically mend his surroundings with simple and ignoble materials such as Styrofoam, corrugated plastic sheeting, concrete and gravel. He makes apparent the local manifestation of modernism – at times violent, at times ugly and insensitive, aesthetically reminiscent of memorials and monuments, yet also liberates and redeems it from its original aesthetic value and deems it sublime in its appearance within the installation. The deep ravine separating the experience and its realization is partnered by ironic and humoristic attributes that question the attempt to reach the transcendental.
The exhibition is sponsered by:
Tuboul Group | Plazit Polygal- The Plastic Sheet Group