Press Release
In a series of 11 color photographs of various sizes, Shochat appropriates the concept of perceived beauty, blending interior with exterior, to highlight the unpredictable boundary between the real and the artificial. Shochat depicts portraits of women and of trees with various calculated backdrops that on first glance look very natural yet on further observance appear magically produced. Mathematically and logically proportioned, the images that Shochat creates represent a highly composed ephemeral world, a beautiful and ordered realm, where one lives among nature but not reality.
Shochat's photographs deliberately juxtapose basic cultural icons with presumed expectations; nature and artifice combined in what is neither a real nor a natural scene. Studio lighting obliterates traces of "place" and the viewer observes a thing of beauty that is unidentifiable. In one image, wallpaper from the 1960s is suspended on scaffolding out of doors, in front of a nine-foot lemon tree; photographed at night with artificial lighting to create a work of art that is both, simultaneously, in nature and yet de-contextualized from it. Natural looking but impossible to be so, the highly composed photographs can be seen as striving to control sensuality through order.
Tal Shochat was born in 1974 in Netanya and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. Her work has exhibited at various museums within Israel, including the Herzliya Museum, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel Museum, and Haifa Museum of Art. Most recently (2005), she received the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture Prize for a Young Artist.
Awakening
Tal Shochat
September 8 - October 22, 2005
Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Israeli artist, Tal Shochat. This will be Shochat's first one-person show in North America.In a series of 11 color photographs of various sizes, Shochat appropriates the concept of perceived beauty, blending interior with exterior, to highlight the unpredictable boundary between the real and the artificial. Shochat depicts portraits of women and of trees with various calculated backdrops that on first glance look very natural yet on further observance appear magically produced. Mathematically and logically proportioned, the images that Shochat creates represent a highly composed ephemeral world, a beautiful and ordered realm, where one lives among nature but not reality.
Shochat's photographs deliberately juxtapose basic cultural icons with presumed expectations; nature and artifice combined in what is neither a real nor a natural scene. Studio lighting obliterates traces of "place" and the viewer observes a thing of beauty that is unidentifiable. In one image, wallpaper from the 1960s is suspended on scaffolding out of doors, in front of a nine-foot lemon tree; photographed at night with artificial lighting to create a work of art that is both, simultaneously, in nature and yet de-contextualized from it. Natural looking but impossible to be so, the highly composed photographs can be seen as striving to control sensuality through order.
Tal Shochat was born in 1974 in Netanya and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. Her work has exhibited at various museums within Israel, including the Herzliya Museum, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel Museum, and Haifa Museum of Art. Most recently (2005), she received the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture Prize for a Young Artist.