January 2024
A dialogue between Reshef's art installation and the visionary ideas and actions of her great-grandfather, Moshe Smilansky.
Opening Reception, 19 January, at 10:30 am
Gallery Talk, 23 February, at 10:30 am
Rotem Reshef's work in recent years sheds light on materials that were perceived as waste, unnecessary, or outdated while imprinting them on enormous scrolls of canvas (one of those displayed in the exhibition is 82 feet long). She paints a ghostly presence of phantom memories, of what seems to have ceased to exist, but yet is rediscovered in a different way, drawing attention to the small details that make up personal experiences.
In her most recent solo exhibition, “Family of Earth,” Reshef references the life and work of her great grandfather, Moshe Smilansky, a Zionist leader who advocated peaceful coexistence with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine and whose social and ideological entrepreneurship marks one of the highlights of an era that seems long gone. “Family of Earth” collides nostalgia with an elegy, on what was then and what has turned out to be the present days of past eras’ vision.
Reshef wraps and soaks “testimonial objects” she collects in paint while leaving their marks before being removed from the canvas. Through the process of wrapping and peeling, Reshef seeks to tell a story and present an experience and ideas - some concrete, some abstract - that will be discovered by the visitors to the exhibition.
On the canvases remains a kind of mental landscape composed of geological fossils, an artistic testimony of collective and personal memories of the past that connect to the turbulent present.
In this processed, fragmentary reconstruction, based on observation and distancing, Reshef invites viewers to meditatively wander along the sprawling scroll paintings and, through their journey, share a universal experience of introspection and healing.
