Andrea Meislin Gallery presents an exhibition of new photographs by Ilit Azoulay, The Keys. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States. Azoulay’s photographic process focuses on the creation of a completely staged visual environment. She creates a space of research and examination by sampling and scanning with a 35 mm digital camera and a macro lens. The process is both time-consuming and extremely diligent, but it is also the basic condition that enables her works to exist.
Azoulay’s environment is built out of collected materials that were once a part of something larger but are now a testimony of something that is no more, objects that have lost their functionality. Azoulay avidly collects the detritus of modern life and utilizes it to tell a story about the aesthetic, cultural and historic values of contemporary times.
Prior to being photographed, each object undergoes an archaeological process in which it is cleaned, oiled, painted if necessary and Azoulay finds a specific characteristic about the work that she enhances. Afterwards, the objects undergo a process of sorting, compartmentalizing, cataloguing, naming and are placed in appropriate boxes, divided by area or material. Each object is then scanned with the digital camera, always at eye level and in the daylight. Photographing the objects uniformly creates an equal status between the objects, constructing a photograph that offers a more democratic look: scanning without either a center of gravity or a hierarchy of importance within the photograph itself.
In creating her environment, Azoulay gently teases out the visual connections between the objects she has assembled. She also creates a virtual platform to hold all of these objects. The platform is typically a single wall photographed hundreds of times and then digitally reconstructed. The final wall is unlike any other wall, in the artist’s own words, “it is like a body whose organs have been reproduced, emphasized and processed: the flaws, the holes, the stains and the different textures.” The entire composition is something that has never before existed outside of the mind of the artist.
Born 1972, Ilit Azoulay lives and works in Tel Aviv. She is a graduate of Bezalel Academy’s BFA (1998) and MFA (2010) programs. Azoulay had received various prizes, including the 2011 Gerald Levy Prize for a Young Photographer from The Israel Museum and the 2010 Award for Excellent Achievements in the MFA program at Bezalel Academy. Her works can be found in various private collections as well as in the collection of The Israel Museum.
On view until AUGUST 12, 2011
Andrea Meislin Gallery
526 W 26th St #214
New York NY 10001
