The encounter between Pessi Margulies (http://pessi.com) and Gil Lavi (http://gillavi.com) is one between a painter who started using a camera as a brush, and a photographer who started photographing with a pencil.Their almost primal relations with these technics had surfaced new dilemmas between language and tool; Margulies’ photographs are quite painterly, while Lavi’s childlike portrait drawings are following photographic composition and weight rules . In their work both challenge each other’s tool and its relevance to their own, and how far can one medium contain another. At the same time both artists are utilizing their well experienced tool with the new experimented one as part of their subject matter: A search for a grounding place. Their search is walking us through each memory’s footprints.
Walking is a recurrent motive in Margulies’ video and photographic work, while in her paintings recurrent is the physical house constructed by layers of memories. In her abstract photographs series Margulies depicts color stains as footsteps, road-map or building blocks for the desired safe place…..while exhibiting the painterly qualities of her photography.
Combining drawing with his photographs, Lavi’s is using materials from childhood as flashbacks; The image of the red lights against a car’s windshield originated by the memory of missiles he used to watch flying over his house during the gulf war. He reacts to the image, not to the moment itself, by applying to it a naive drawing thus highlights the discrepancy between the experience and its meaning. Lavi’s body of work “Existential Fear” is made of six panels of black and white plains, represents the endless search for for escape against the feeling of loss of sense of self and place.
Studio 88, 93 N 6 street Brooklyn NY
Friday Nov 1st, 6pm – 10pm Saturday Nov 2nd, 12pm – 10pm Sunday Nov 3rd, 12pm – 6pm
October, 2013 Monthly archive
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