STATEMENT OF WORK

As a queer Jerusalem-born artist, questions around space and how bodies occupy it have been ever-present in my life and art. My practice explores the politics and aesthetics embedded within architecture, looking at structures of state surveillance and power such as watch towers, bunkers, “safe” spaces, and tunnels, and how they provide feelings of security and comfort, or alternately, horror and control. My works shape shift from representational architecture to abstraction, and materially from large-scale sculptural installations to discrete, highly-textured and labored drawings. These seemingly disparate ways of working are crucial to how I think about space.

I often look at the world as a theatrical stage-set, where various actors organize their environments as if utilizing props and backdrops in a play. I’m interested in the aesthetic and spatial qualities of these “props” - how ornamentation, texture, surface, and optical illusion define this sociopolitical performance. Working across two and three dimensions allows me to explore the ways that these tools interact and co-mingle both physically and within the imagination.

Recurring symbols in my drawing and sculptural work explore the dialectics between creation and destruction. For example, the grid has traditionally been used to speak to human intervention, and the geographic mapping of land. It has associations with order and organization, as well as violent conquest and mastery. I am interested in how the grid functions as a world building device - both through creative and often otherworldly aesthetics (like in a video-game, or to map the trajectory of celestial phenomena like a black hole), as well as through more brutal uses such as colonial control. The grid ultimately sets the stage for the imagination.

The stage, another symbol I utilize across media, holds layers of time. It embodies the history of past performances, its current state of action or inaction, and the anticipation of a future happening. The stage is in a constant state of flux whereby the worlds it presents get continuously made and destroyed. My practice reflects the multivalent meanings behind the word “stage” as both a verb and a noun, alluding to an unseen powerful actor, or to the fallacy of a situation.

Recent works have incorporated craters, which are emblematic of impact. A crater elicits doomsday imagery, a violent ripping and displacement of land—a wound. Alternatively, it can represent an opening of possibility, a wormhole to another universe, or a psychological awakening. I’m drawn to the multifaceted meanings of these symbols. They speak to the gray areas within life - to realities we don't have to accept, and to possibilities beyond what may seem feasible.