BY GABRIELA SCHUTZ
In this exhibition the artists Adrian Barron, Liron Lupu, Irith Gubi and Gabriela Schutz are trying to illuminate the concept of the home; as a dream, a shelter, a financial investment or a political act. They are fascinated with the uneasy relationship between the nostalgic Technicolor tinted fantasy, and the frequently brutal reality.
Building in Israel these days is often done by contractors and in many cases is political. Ready- made houses with city planning and playgrounds are a rung in the real- estate ladder; Contemporary fortresses viewing a primordial and provoking landscape, a ‘Wall & Tower’ in the Holy Land.
Installation view ‘There is No Place like Home’
© Irith Gubi
The name of the exhibition relates to Dorothy from the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ who needed to click her heels 3 times, (a central number in fairly tales), in order to return home from the fantasy world back to reality. In the movie, Oz is a colourful and spectacular land as opposed to the ‘Black and White’ reality where she comes from. The artists of this show are interested in the dissonance between these two positions.
In Adrian Barron’s etchings, he relates to a series of books- ‘Janet and John’ that was popular in the teaching of schoolchildren throughout the 50’s to the 70’s in the UK. In his work ‘Janet and John in Spain’ he teaches the naive children about accumulation of capital and capitalism. In ‘Landing’ Barron kept the original text but changed the illustrations from aeroplanes into tanks. War in his view, is part of the human condition and therefore will not go away in the foreseeable future. Its repetitive nature lends itself well to the nature of print. ‘Ink Blots from the Emerald City’ relates to the capital of Oz where all the citizens are required to wear green tinted glasses, therefore seeing everything green. The Rorschach blots that are meant to reflect on the observer’s mind, impose only one way of viewing them.
© Irith Gubi
Liron Lupu’s paintings present pastoral settlements and landscape across the Green Line. They are arenas for violent scenes of executions, firing ranges and carcasses consumed by prey. But even when the scenes look innocent, like those where we see farmers on tractors or donkeys, the red sky and the vultures hint at a bitter ending. The strong and almost naive use of colour looks as if taken from old children’s books. By using the aesthetics of Zionist propaganda posters from the 40’s and 50’s Lupu creates connection between the zeal of the first settlers who founded Israel, and between the current desire to erect a house whatever the cost is.
Irith Gubi ‘s photographs also deal with the dissonance between reality and the pastoral. With meticulous composition, perfect lighting and situations that seem to have been directed, Gubi narrates the story of Israel and its landscapes. She loves excursions and trips, waiting for the eccentricities that only reality can provide. In many of her works there is longing for a past that was gone, but often reality invades, and spoils the wilderness.
Installation view ‘There is No Place like Home’
© Irith Gubi
Gabriela Schutz experiences Israel as a local and an outsider, (having lived in London for 16 years). The longing for the people, vegetation and climate is mixed with a distant perspective and a deep disappointment with the unresolved political situation. The ‘Holyland’ series relates to the Romantic aesthetics and depiction of the Levant and the Holy Land by travellers and artists from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In her work the distance between ‘Holywoodian’ fantasy and a blazing reality is being revealed only when we understand that that the strategically dominating settlements on the tops of the mountains are Jewish, and that they are in Palestine. The Arcadian landscape is not so pastoral after all.
The space between fantasy, dreams, fiery vision and belief, and between complicated and charged reality, is the topic of this show, where the home and the house are the vehicles to examine it. Perhaps if we click our heels 3 times and say ‘there is no place like home’, reality and fantasy will become one essence.