Dogs of Pompeii

Uriel Miron: Dogs of Pompeii
Curator: Aya Miron

Hebrew

In the exhibition Dogs of Pompeii, Uriel Miron returns to his memories of three dogs he encountered among the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii: a mosaic floor, a marble statue, and a plaster cast of the cavity left by the body of a real dog. The dogs of Pompeii articulate complex relations between the threatening and the threatened through three extreme states: dying and death, eruptive life force, and birth or the beginning of life. These characteristics of the Pompeii dogs—as in an evolutionary process—merge, change, and give rise to entities in Miron’s fourteen new sculptures. Patient labor and tens of thousands of accumulated actions yielded bodies full of movements that congealed and preserved life and annihilation, pleasure and suffering, calm and fervor alike.

As with the dogs of Pompeii that Miron saw, the material and mass in the sculptures of the present exhibition harbor a space at their center—a core of emptiness. Walking among the different viewpoints gives life to these spaces, causing them to open and contract, to pulse and breathe. The sculptures in the exhibition are bodies tense with muscles that seek to burst out from within themselves, to break through a membrane that envelops them like the volcanic ash that buried the life of the city.

The large-scale sculpture Playing for Time, which opens the exhibition, brings the writhing and convulsive motion to an extreme, like the path of an elated dog running about between the walls of the space with uncontrollable enthusiasm (a.k.a. “zoomies”). It is composed of skeletal elements, pale bluish in color, connected at complex joints like a gigantic skeleton that emerged from a glacier. The soaring and hovering arches of Playing for Time draw a line in space—and also a winding historical line between the Roman arches of ruined Pompeii and the arches of the Ottoman structure of Chelouche Gallery in Jaffa.