Artist statement:North TrueSouth Bright
In this series of photographs, each work is formed by connecting the negative and the positive exposures of the same image. Originally, the photographs were taken with film, and the connection between the positive and negative was done on the computer. The finished images are screened statically in a darkened space
Most of the photographs in the series, which is still in development, were taken between 2008-2009 in countries like Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Jordan and Israel. Most of them were shot outdoors and range from direct documentary photography to different degrees of intervention in the photographed area.
Some of them engage in an intensive dialogue with the site photographed, while in others the site serves as a platform for a sculptural or a pictorial gesture. Sometimes a short text is added, which responds to the photograph in which it appears, or to the entire series. After scanning and separating the film into positive and negative, the landscape continues to change through the digital means: Parts of the picture vanish or change shape, and other objects are added to it.
This action, which combines the positive and the negative, was born from a fantasy about the possibility that a photograph could reappear charged with a loaded range completely deviating from reality, of non-linear relationships between the real and fiction, a range that obviously cannot be captured in photography. All interferences in the image, from the hybridization of the film to the intervention in the site photographed, the sculptural gestures and the text, apparently seek to produce a uniform surface. However, after an extended inspection the photographs deconstruct into several levels of representation with a varying ontological status – or so it seems.
Though the negative is crowded with information, as it is exposed with a large format of 4×5, the completed photos are screened as a digital file, in an intended renunciation of the hyper-realistic qualities, and multiple details of the large format. The gap between the projected image, light and lacking substance, and the material presence it points at – and especially, being a product of the hybridization that increases the illusion of volume – is of interest to me, as it relates to the space in photography today. The works turn the gaze to structures and objects that are no longer in use, or those who did not get to function as the object for which they were built (like King Hussein’s palace in east Jerusalem, which was never completed). some constructions were built specifically for the photographs, and they have no use beyond that. Through the political and historical screen arises an echoing anticipation to see that which is standing in front of you within the landscape – or, contrarily, its impossibility of appearing; yet the various intervention in the photographic arena – playful, statuesque and pictorial – appear a equal entities – whose sole purpose it to tell a story of the very moment the story is told. This is a story told from a perspective that does not owe an explanation to given historical or geographical truths, but rather plays and uses them at will, during which it also turns its interest upon itself. This perspective touches upon, of course, the classic narratives, albeit in partial, fragile and fragmented ways. In any case, I believe that thought processes, as well as conceptualization and generalization are not enough when faced with these photographs. The path of access to them requires dedication to their sensory appearance but also to contemplation of it – of the space and conditions of its appearance, like of the objects of photography and the photograph itself. The body of works is displayed via a static video projector. The projection reflects a desire to get rid of the excess material presence of the printed and framed photograph, the tension between the fetishization of the object and what it photographed of it, and the commercial value automatically attached to the viewing experience. It is important for me to produce an image that is not an object, an artifact that is not produced to be boxed or put to paper, and does not require an interest in its tightness, thickness, etc.; something that does not create the desire to posses it, nor can it become obsolete, become yellow and harmed, but a digital image, a binary sequence stored on the wires, a file that the potential viewer can download and project. Another important matter in the work is the darkened exhibition space, and the particular projected presence of the images glowing
at the viewer. Being in the darkened space the viewer can see his own body as well as the bodies of those in the space with him, in a way which drastically differs from being in an illuminated space. The funnel of light beaming from the images creates a ghostly world in which the viewer walks as in a natural continuation of the abandoned, illuminated utopia in which they are. The viewer feels his body weight lighten and lift, like the photographs that disappear at the touch of a button. This meeting between the severe materialism and concreteness of the buildings and other places in the photographs, and the light beaming from them, and the vacuum – or this airiness that stems from the lack of the object – is essential to me. The viewer steps into a space that simulates a world, and when each of the images projected in it obeys to the regularity of the work, the reality of that very world that is experienced at that moment as an existing place, is reinforced. This is the threshold that reveals itself through the work as a place in which contradictions are possible, the space voluntarily trapped between the real and the non-real; this is the view of both day and night, a glow in the dark.