STATEMENT
The dynamic versatility of new mediums and cross-disciplines has presented artists with options to address the familiar human body with new and personal vocabulary.
Although I cast my figurative sculptures using the traditional lost-wax-method, I have taken them off the 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 both ends. Rooted in despair, it is the engine that propels us to overcome insurmountable obstacles and change reality. It is primal and timeless. That every period defines yearning on its own terms, is a testament to the fundamental role it has in our quest to change and rise.
Nowadays, yearning amplifies voices of lost touch and trusted 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 differently by the two genders. 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 power climbing on their private lives has led me to give voice to men's duality in sculpting it as disconnected pairs. Women, on the other side, are all inclusive. With their newly acquired muscular physicality, women express the desire to be equal to men in a world defined by the latter's exclusive power. But as they climb, most women have voiced the need to connect with the other and acknowledged their own state of vulnerability.
The simultaneous existence of the new muscularity in the curvature of a woman's body is the immediate form of duality. The other is created between the muscular structure and gestures of yearning and reaching, adding tension and poignancy that we all experience in our daily lives. The duality is also apparent in marks of physical want. Against the power of muscularity, the female nude is also stripped of features such as smooth skin and beautiful hair. While scars and scratches are signs of struggle, I used baldness to increase the expression of vulnerability. While the stripping of other details was done in part to create a sense of universality, the lack of hair, like that of clothing, pointed to an act of displacement and anonymity: another losing battle in contemporary life.
The editorial stripping was not only developed by deleting the segments of the body, which were not relevant to the message, but went further to present the remaining ones as if they were seen through a frame. Those ‘cut outs’ ended in being non gender specific. As such, they aided in blurring the borders between the genders. Thus, they represent the female and male contemporary images as equal in their quest for being heard and validated.
Further minimizing the figurative elements took place when I moved to focus on monumental hands. My fascination with oversized hands’ unique architecture and emotional vocabulary has been expressed in my previous painting career. But only with my selection to install a 9/11 Memorial in Pennsylvania did I start to sculpt monumental hands as messengers of duality.
The Commission had called for the inclusion of a WTC I-beam, which, under the enormous heat, has been transformed to express human vulnerability. A pair of seven-and-a-half-foot bronze hands, anchored to a column, lifted the scorched and badly twisted I-beam close to twenty feet into the sky. The hands were rough and muscular, but they lifted the I-beam so tenderly that they seemed not to have touched it at all. As the tenderness gave voice to the constructive role of remembrance in the collective consciousness, the invisible touch magnified its absence in our lives.
Touch is what we have lost and what we long for most. 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 or lose the yearning to have it.
Yearning 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 may win.
January 2019