The Guardian of the Pearl's Shadow - Part A
The Guardian of the Pearl's Shadow was presented as a solo exhibition at the Sommer Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2004.
The gallery space was divided into three different states of consciousness, each room suggesting a different perspective of an identical experience. The entrance to the gallery was defined by sliding doors, later incorporated as the gate drawings in The Guardians of the Threshold installation in Venice. Drawings of typical modernist structures, as well as the specific entrance to the classical fifties housing project apartment of the artist's parents in Ashdod, covered all the walls of the central space. Each drawing focused on a still life of tree trunks or organic vegetation, positioned in disconnected clusters at the entrance to the housing project itself.
The second room featured a large black object resembling a double bed. At its center was a three-dimensional scene of an enchanted garden, composed entirely of handmade elements and drawings of various sections of tree trunks, forming a world that felt both complete and meticulously detailed.
The third, most poetic room displayed the windows, which were later shown as the Shadows Wall at the Israeli Pavilion in Venice. It contained sliding windows bearing ink drawings suggesting tattoo etchings of tree shadows. At the center of the room stood a sculpture of an Egyptian canoe, containing a hollow house floating on the black waters of a lake, where precious stones were buried.
The light in this room came from an ordinary lamp bearing ink drawings of tree shadows, whose forms extended across the walls and windows.
The exhibition as a whole suggested a structure of encement and obstruction, where the images were both open and blocked simultaneously. The central motif was the simultaneous split or multiplicity of perspectives within each work and its designated space. The core of the installation focused on the fragmentation of both physical and mental space into three areas, each addressing a single center from different intellectual, conscious, and emotional angles. The result was the complex nature of the work, composed of open and obstructed parts, suggesting a narrative as the central movement, while simultaneously concluding with a formalistic presentation.
Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
