NYAB Event - Ilit Azoulay "Room #8"

Ilit Azoulay "Room #8"

Andrea Meislin Gallery

This event has ended.

Andrea Meislin Gallery presents Ilit Azoulay’s second exhibition at the gallery: Room #8. The artist dramatically dissects the gallery with a diagonal wall, featuring her large-scale work Room #8 (2011) on one side, and three new works on the reverse side.

In her photographs, Ilit Azoulay invents fictitious environments that reflect the work of an archaeologist, remodeler, obsessive archivist, and composer. Beginning with fieldwork, Azoulay visits buildings in Tel Aviv that are scheduled to be demolished and studies the surfaces of the walls, surveying the materials and their relationship to the space. After the building is destroyed, she scours the demolition site, collecting objects and specimens hidden in the rubble. Azoulay then meticulously rehabilitates and photographs the objects in her studio in preparation for the final composition stage in which she combines hundreds of images. The final works are imagined environments that give new life to discarded objects that were once remnants of destruction.

Azoulay’s gallery installation of Room #8, (2011), of which the original single wall installation was acquired by the Centre Pompidou, divides the composed 32-foot panoramic photograph into four continuous sections. Objects, shadows, and surfaces converse in a panorama full of unexpected details. The carefully organized display asks us to consider the relationship between individual parts, as perplexing contraptions and balancing acts abound. Bright and shiny specimens do not distract from hints of erosion. Recognizable objects are found in unusual circumstances, while familiar looking artifacts prove to be unidentifiable. The occasional reference to a known work of art – in this case, a Duane Hanson sculpture – delights, but is no more featured than a sliced apple or a row of sticks. Amidst this symphony of objects, we sense that Room #8 holds secrets.

Azoulay explains, “Like a cabinet of curiosities (wunderkammer) the display is intended to create interferences in the place where our brain is conditioned to create connections and meanings between the objects.” Devoid of any fixed meaning, the walls allow a realistic reading, yet also manage to remain abstract.

Three recent works are presented on the east side of the gallery. In Intoxication of Oblivion, Azoulay uses a similar process of stitching together images to create an imagined space. In contrast to Room #8, this visual information reflects a site of restoration rather than demolition. Visiting a building that was being preserved in northern Israel, Azoulay could not collect physical objects as she did at demolition sites, so instead, she collected specimens only with her camera. Relative Parts and By Mutual Assent are site-specific; each is composed of images from a different building. The photographs reveal hints of plausible spaces that connect impossibly, capturing the sites in a unique stage of transition.

Azoulay’s photographs present us with a series of visual riddles, providing just enough information to send us searching for realism – but eventually we must surrender and see the spaces as she imagines them.

Ilit Azoulay was born in 1972 and lives and works in Tel Aviv. She received a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and an MFA from the Bezalel Academy in Tel Aviv. She is a recipient of the Israel Museum’s Gerard Levy Prize for a Young Photographer, the Tel Aviv Museum’s Constantiner Photography Award, as well as the Israeli Culture and Sports Ministry Prize. Most recently, Azoulay is honored to be the first recipient of a residency and exhibition at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, an award sponsored by the KW Institute along with the Shpilman Institute for Photography and the Schir Foundation.

[Image: Ilit Azoulay "Room #8" (2011) Archival pigment print, 59 x 394 in.]