Project no.138

 

Irit Bluzer

Menachem's Sea

 

Chief Curator: Rachel Sukman
Guest Curator: Tamar Eloul


Opening: Thurs. 09.08.2012
Closing: 05.09.2012

***********************
6 Zamenhoff St. (near Dizengoff Square), Tel Aviv, tel.: 03-5254191
Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.- 2 p.m., Mon.-Thurs. 5-7 p.m


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Boat’, 2011
acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

Boat’, 2009
glued print, acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

Boat’, 2011
acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

     
     

Boat’, 2011
acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

Boat’, 2011
acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

Boat’, 2009
acrylic on canvas,67x65 cm

     
     

stitched photo’, 2011
copy on canvas,60x50 cm

stitched photo’, 2011
copy on canvas,60x50 cm

stitched photo’, 2011
copy on canvas,60x50 cm

     
     

 

Traumatic Realism*

 

Irit Bluzer presents images which she deconstructs and reconstructs. She extracts two photographs from the extended family archive, creating a series of works around each. The image becomes an object, and the artist's acts effectuate subjective appropriation. The photographs provide information regarding appearance, period, etc., but do not convey the experience itself, neither that of the photographed subjects, nor that of an individual who is affined with the depicted figures and can recount stories about them. Bluzer occupies this interstice. By means of sewing and paint she fills it with data, offering interpretation, while intertwining her personal experience.

            Bluzer works with the image until it literally hurts. She tears it gently and accurately, placing it on the canvas to construct it anew. She sews piece by piece, stitching the image together, nursing it. Bluzer is a slave to labor. She leans over the canvas to the point of physical pain, which sometimes neutralizes her for months. Exposing her work process, she becomes bare and vulnerable like the paper on which the photograph is printed.

In addition to the naïve struggle embodied by the acts of deconstruction and re-stitching, the exhibition unfolds a struggle between the private and the universal, as manifested in the title, "Menachem's Sea," which combines the name of a specific person with a universal image. This struggle is further enhanced by the fact that the image, which is so highly charged for the artist, is identified by the chance beholder as the image of a young man in his 20s in mid-20th century East Europe. Moreover, it is also associated with the appropriation of the pain of loss by society and culture (from the pietà to memorial days).

Bluzer was not present at the time the photograph was taken. She lends subjective interpretation to another man's experience. At the same time, she treats the image as sacred via a process of adaptation, which fears loss; a fluttering process, striving to keep it intact. Two forces are at work in Bluzer's pieces: on the one hand, appropriation of the image, the desire to contain, digest, touch; on the other hand—the fear of touching the image, and the desire to control it, to master the memory and the experience that was, or the one that is to evolve and shape us.

The exhibition echoes Derrida's process of deconstruction. The question thus arises: Can a process of social or private healing take place when the image/memory is not truly deconstructed, when one is reluctant to concede on perfection?

 

Tamar Eloul, curator of the exhibition
August 2012

 

* "I think we must, and we can if we read them in a third way, in terms of traumatic realism"; see: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), p. 130.