Sheraton Beach

Curator: Adi Gura

Karabelnikov-Paz views the site of the Sheraton Beach as a microcosm of the urban orthodox and religious Jewish community. Unlike her prior works, this collection attends to the quotidian routines in the religious society and the relationships that form between the women on the beach.
In this exhibition, the artist continues to work with her unique technique. Her paintings are layers of colored masking tape, not manipulated in any way but rather placed piece-by-piece one on top of another, resulting in a complete and whole sculpture-like formation. The modeled repetition, being free of hierarchy, creates an image in which every detail receives equal attention.
A critical view of the community, in the clash between the holy and mundane, is evident in each of the works. In Women Digging in Sand, the women’s actions exhibit intimacy and evoke sexual connotations set against a rather banal activity of sand digging. A great deal of attention is apparent in the details of the body or textures of clothing, despite the restriction of dressing to draw attention. The subtle scenes represent Karabelnikov-Paz’s ambivalent approach to this secular public domain. Underlining the iconographic signs of contemporary clothing and modern objects is the filter into the orthodox world. There exists in her new work a balance between the secular, sexualized scenery of the modern world and a sacred, meditative spirit of the religious world.
In another series, the artist observes the beach scene. In theses works the urban setting manifests as sacred, in contrast to the treatment of the closed setting of the beach, overturning the scene. The sacred atmosphere

appears in the man-made areas, whereas nature is exposed as ordinary and mundane in the hands of man. Despite the colorful technique in her works, there exists a strong sense of melancholy. The streets of the city of Bene Baraq, as viewed from a window of a home, empty of people, a turbulent coastline during a storm and the burnt sky that appears in each work of this series, all tell the story of the religious experience in a secular surrounding and the feelings that this urbanism evokes in the artist.

Opens: Thursday, March 1st, 2012, 8pm