Chelouche Gallery cordially invites you to
Book Launch & Artist Talk
following
Tal Shoshan’s
ShadeDays
With curators Hadas Maor and Irena Gordon
Text: Irena Gordon
“Nothing will grow here only / Laugh to me your/ Black teeth so I’ll know”
ShadeDays is an exhibition of apocalyptic memory materialized. Tal Shoshan is creating an ancient landscape that resembles an aqua-swamp space, densely populated with objects that appear to grow from the ground or to be born from one another; some long, their ends touching the ceiling, connecting earth to sky, but simultaneously creating a seemingly looking jail-booth that closes-in on the visitor. Other objects are short, in a sort of growth or hewing process, as if stopped while growing, and are now becoming nature’s ghosts, marks in a disaster area. The space invites the visitors and pulls them, like in a horror film, to move inside it, to come close to the sculptural structures, and to observe the infinite revealed and concealed details that constitute them. Is it the thing in itself or only its shadow – that the artist follows and draws in materiel?
Shoshan (b. 1969), a sculptress, performance artist and sketcher, is mapping spaces by creating scenes of relics, of unraveling, of signs. By working with textile materials and different textile practices, together with a unique use of industrial materials, she produces a language of soft sculpture which presents dark environments, both organic and artificial. In each new project, Shoshan situates a journey, or a chapter in a journey, that takes place in space and in the body. The journey always occurs through sculpture that has, at the same time, a light-sketchy and a massive-substantive character to it. The space works on a vertical line, but also clearly marks a horizontal, perspective line, that is sometimes open and sometimes closed, like the present one; a sculpture-space that is a vegetative-animal body which spreads everywhere, but is about to converge into itself at any moment; an object or objects that are extra-feminine but also intra-feminine, mysterious and enchanting just as they are ordinary, simple and completely exposed.
