Untitled Document

Dalit Gurevich
Multimedia Installation
At Dam, Stuhltrager

By James Kalm

Our perception of the world is made up of sets of dualities: day and night, hot and cold, hard and soft, now and then.

Our perceptions of art are consciously and willingly manipulated using a more formal vocabulary of dualities: dark against light, curved against straight, static against the moving.  But the means that gives form to concept, that creates structure from inarticulateness, which applies as much to music, poetry or drama as to the visual arts, is contrast.

In her new body of work, Dalit Gurevich makes use of contrasts in ways that are at once uncharted yet familiar, comforting and also disquieting, as if observing the works themselves requires the viewer to bring an awareness of their own competing dualities to fully appreciate the pieces.

The juxtaposition of the video and projections against the paintings seems more than a formal experiment on a purely visual level.  It is at the same time an experiment in contrasting strands of narrative, the documented against the remembered, and the factual against the fanciful.  Ironically, these works also create a fracture between the “then” and the “now.”   The paintings, because of their intricate compositions, deft draftsmanship and rich color, speak to a commitment of time and dedication, and with the presence of the humanistic “hand” in their execution, appear to float in a perpetual “now.”  Conversely, the grainy and faded photos and video projections, which were photographically captured in a twinkling, read as being forever frozen in the fast receding “then.”

While the paintings are self portraits, and deal chronologically with Gurevich’s past as a child raised within the Israeli kibbutz scheme (a system that separated her from her family for the most part), this body of work might also be seen as a type of “healing practice” or therapy.  The weaving together of these various lines of historic and recalled narrative allows the artist to deal not only with her own complex past, but to also establish new relationships with that past for both herself and the viewer.  To the sensitive observer it begins to become clear that while the past may be unchanging, our memories of it are not.  As memory is a function of the present, it is ever-changing.   If painting, as its most devout supporters advocate, is a language which allows the inexpressible to be expressed, a medium which can bring forth form from the unconscious to the conscious world, then it is indeed a valid media with which to depict the complex nature of being a person existing between the worlds of the past and the future.  This incorporation of recovered documentary photos and film and their use as counterpoints and frames to the paintings, establishes a device wherein the field of time, can be modulated as color might be used to modulate the sense of space.  Dalit Gurevich with this innovative installation, attempts to establish a network of relationships between her past and present, rendering them into images depicting these complicated links, and through our memories hopefully they will echo into the future.

James Kalm is a painter and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn.

DDalit Gurevich – Multimedia Installation

The multimedia exhibit by DALIT GUREVICH is presented in conjunction with "SHOOT" ...

An exclusive engagement premiering fresh short films by emerging artists.

2 EVENTS. 3 DAYS. 18 FREE SHOTS to see 15 short films in 1 HOUR . . . SHOOT curated by Jessica Lauretti

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