Talia Keinan
Video and Drawing Installation
Art Statements, Art 37 Basel
Hall 0.1 Booth A18
Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art
60 Ehad Ha’am St. Tel Aviv 65202
tel: 972 3 566 0123
fax: 972 3 560 7186
http://www.nogagallery.com
Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art is proud to present Talia Keinan‘s New Video and Drawing Installation at Art Statements, Art 37 Basel 14-18 June 2006.
Talia Keinan
A Place for Art
Talia Keinan’s works strive to create a place for themselves, to create themselves as a place. The various elements – drawings, objects, video projections – come together to form a whole setting which is a place where things happen, primarily – magic. The drawings comes to life, the gravel carpet is resurrected, light and darkness switch intermittently.
A festive atmosphere on the verge of ritualism engulfs Talia Keinan’s works. On a large-scale canvas (painted in black gouache) she has created, for example, a landscape scene rendered in pencil with assiduous meticulousness. The imagined dark landscape is striking in itself, but one is truly dumbfounded when it transforms into a screening surface, illuminated by a beam of light, with trees and leaves swaying on it in the wind. The act of painting is tantamount to a journey, or a hike. The hike is conducted along the stones which the hand itself draws; the landscape is created while walking within it.
When the canvas is illuminated, the painted stones are convincing in their three-dimensionality; you can almost stumble upon them. When the screening light goes out and you approach the painting, you realize that the image is but a mass of hatched lines. Screening thereon strives to infuse them with life, to generate magic, but only so that ultimately the viewer will return to the canvas and to the realization that he is concerned with a painting, or with objects.
The transitions between light and darkness, create cycles of condensed units of day and night. In the short spans of “day” when everything is lit, there is a sense of order and clarity. In the periods of “night”, when darkness falls, panic and chaos are generated. Dawn, however, immediately breaks, and everything starts again. Unlike the linear story of Creation – from chaos to a world of order and regularity, Keinan’s story of creation sustains a sense of order and clarity alongside a collapse into the dark and boundless void.
Through light and sound, Talia Keinan transforms her body of work into a place – some deserted place on the margins of the main road. The viewer-visitor to the place is engulfed by a strange feeling that things operate by themselves; things that do not necessarily maintain a narrative sequence coexist side by side. The story, if one insists on composing it, is spawned by the way in which all the various details are sheltered under a cyclical veil of light and darkness.
Ruti Direktor
Art critic, Curator
Tel Aviv, May 2006
Talia Keinan was born in 1978; she graduated the MFA program in the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Tel Aviv in June 2005. She has won one of the most prestigious prizes in Israel, The Wolf Foundation – Anselm Kiefer Prize for young artist in 2005. In 2007 she will have a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
For further information please contact Veronica Yudkevich at Noga Gallery.
During the fair you can call Nechama Gottlib at 972 54 443 8679, Adina Alshech at 972 50 532 0700