The Last of Summer (Detail)
“The dynamic versatility of new mediums and cross-disciplines have presented artists with options to address the familiar human body with new and personal vocabulary.
Although my sculptures are figurative and cast in the lost-wax-method, I have taken them off their old representational role to become metaphors for the contemporary human condition of yearning for what we have lost.
Yearning, a complex emotional state of long duration, stems from contradictions presented at its opposite ends. Rooted in despair, yearning is the engine that propels us to overcome insurmountable obstacles and change reality. It is primal and timeless. That every period defines it on its own terms is a testament to our unstoppable quest to rise.
Nowadays, yearning amplifies voices of lost touch and connectedness that were the building-blocks of human interaction in the past. Indeed, powerful accomplishments have brought fast changes in every facet of life. But they also gave birth to large scale phenomena of forced mobility, uncertainty, mistrust and isolation.
The awareness of such duality has been handled by the two genders differently.
Touch (Front view)
Most men, by my observation, talk publicly about the one dominant characteristic, which is crucial to their success. Their reluctance to reveal the existence of doubts or the price of the power-climbing on their private lives, have led me to give voice to men’s duality in housing them in two separate “vessels” of heads. Women, on the other side, draft their entire body as the carrier of duality. With their newly acquired muscular physicality, women express the desire to be equal to men. But as they climb on the career ladder, most have not deserted their need to connect and acknowledge their vulnerability. The new muscularity in the curvature of a woman’s body, is the most obvious physical image of duality. The second is the use of the muscular body to portray gestures of yearning and reaching out — mirroring the tension we experience in our daily lives. The conflict is also aided by the elimination of feminine features: the skin is scarred and rough and the head is bald. Both are signs of exposure and vulnerability. The lack of hair — as that of clothing — points to an act of displacement and anonymity: another losing battle in contemporary life.
The editorial stripping was further developed in sculpting only those body-parts, which were essential to the message, as if they were seen through a cut-off frame. The segmentation turned the selected parts into none-gender specific, and thus, equalizing both genders in their quest to be fully validated and heard.
The Morning After (Version 3)
Further minimizing the figurative elements took place when I recaptured my fascination with the architecture and emotional vocabulary of hands, which had been prominent in my paining. But only with my selection to install a 9/11 Memorial in Pennsylvania, did I start to use them as metaphors for duality. The Memorial included a salvaged I-beam from the North Tower, amorphized by the heat to a wounded bird. A pair of near 8-feet hands, rose off a column to lift the unrecognizable I-beam 18 feet into the sky, their touch totally invisible. The rough and muscular hands were the tenderest, voicing the role of tenderness in the transformation of remembrance into a building block in the collective consciousness. Yet, it was impossible to ignore the risk of raising the I-beam without touching it and not to connect it to the absence of touch in our own lives.
Touch is what we have lost and what we long for. It is a wonderful testament to human resolve that experiencing life, even with today’s anxiety, has not diminished our awareness that we cannot survive without touch. Our yearning for touch points out that what we miss may be more powerful than what we have. And as such, it holds the promise — and the power — that in the conflict between unwanted reality and desire – desire ultimately wins.”
January 2019