Significant Surfaces

The artists participating in the exhibition “Significant Surfaces” all share a practice that involves the use of the camera as part of their work process in drawing, printing, photography or sculpture. They fabricate or interpret photographic images, encode phenomena into two-dimensional signs, convert photographic images into multidimensional objects or restore the latter to their two-dimensional expressions. They understand the elastic power of the image which they treat as a flexible, diffusive, expansive, stretchable, recumbent, spacious, sprawling material.

When artists shoot a photograph or make use of a photographic image, they tear off a piece of tangible reality and gives it shape and content, they forge it out of their own worldview and leave in it fragments of their souls. The photographic image is not a “frozen event”. It strips surfaces out of their time-space and casts them back into new time-spaces. The photographic image is the artist’s physical and conceptual encounter with the world as mediated by the lens.

Theorist Vilém Flusser believes that the meaning of images lies in their very surface. In order to understand the depth of their meaning, a complex mode of observation is necessary, one that grants space for interpretation. As it travels across the image, the gaze fosters relations of meaning between the image’s different components. One component gives meaning to another while concurrently deriving its own meaning from others. Flusser calls it “the magical world”. Photographic images are surfaces invested with meaning. Today, they are the most significant surfaces required for our understanding of the world. They constitute a critical element of our image-flooded life experience and underlie the thinking process and creative practice of many contemporary artists. The universe of images is a source of abundance: there is no artistic, cultural, scientific or political act that does not reckon with it; and there is no day-to-day activity that does not aspire to be photographed.

The exhibition presents emerging artists who have graduated in the past five years from the following art institutions: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem; Shenkar – Engineering. Design. Art; HaMidrasha – Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl College; Musrara – The Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education, and Minshar School of Art.