Revealings
Periscope Design Gallery, solo exhibition
Curator: Dr. Tal Frenkel Alroy
"As a fetishized commodity, landscape is what Marx called a 'social hieroglyph,' an emblem of the social relations it conceals."
W.J.T. Mitchell, Holy Landscape
Ten textile works are hanging in the gallery space, like ten landscape postcards sent from the window of artist Galya Rosenfeld’s studio. It is an implied, illusory landscape made of interlocking modular units. Galya shapes an image and deconstructs it at the same time, assembling and dissolving the landscape using the unique technique she developed. What is a material postcard and what is a handmade cityscape, in a time when images are consumed as souvenirs by digital means.
W.J.T. Mitchell, who is quoted in the opening motto, proposes to examine the concept of "landscape" not as a genre of art but as a physical, multi-sensory and material network of cultural codes and values. Landscape, in his view, is not a natural and innocent paradise but an ideological cultural representation of social and imperialist power relations. Landscape, according to Mitchell, is always an artificial ploy, never innocent.
Galya lives on HaPoel (The Worker) Street in the Nof Yam neighborhood in Herzliya. The neighborhood was built on the lands of the Arab village of Al Haram, which existed until 1948 around the Sidna Ali Mosque. The modest tenement buildings on the street were built following the wave of immigration in the 1950s, for the residents of the ma’abara (temporary community) that was built on the remains of the abandoned Arab village. Today the houses are being demolished in favor of large villas. A generation of workers goes and another generation comes, a layer piles upon a layer. Here and there one can find fragments between the gaps, messy evidence of shadows, faint realms of memory on the margins of life.
In a long and deep process of observation, Galya explored the secrets of the landscape seen from her window in the last year, her piercing gaze wandering outwards and inwards. Out to the olive tree and into the walls of the house; out to the plaster marks and into the aching heart that seeks refuge from the war. What does the landscape tell? Whose and for whom is it? Who is present and who is absent? Who planted and who built? What is hidden in daylight and revealed in the dark?
Using the technique she developed, Galya immortalizes the view as a series of postcards, and at the same time exposes it as a work of fiction. She meticulously copies the color palette of the olive leaves, but encodes the tree according to an artificial grid that she established; she perforates the foliage and removes its details, but preserves the order of the holes in the next postcard; she plasters and hides the fabric with wall putty, but builds an alternative transparent structure from onion peels; she combines building materials with textile and organic materials, but breaks the apparent unity. Galya offers us a landscape that is not one, postcards that are an enigma, open images whose stories we must decipher.
This is the essence of the movement that flows between the works, which are reflected and multiplied and revealed through each other. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to delve deeper into the landscape, into the conflict of fabrics and fabrications, in which there is no foreground and background but only shadows and shapes.
- Dr. Tal Frenkel Alroy