Naama Arad’s ‘Har Hazofim’ quotes the view from the window of the fictional Frank Lloyd Wright creation from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest.’ A peach-toned silken curtain intervenes between our gaze and the Xerox copies pasted to the opposite wall on which landscapes can be seen. The paternalistic presidential visages of Mount Rushmore and the modernist architecture both see their material and ideological texture inverted in the most tender of feminist veilings. The title of the work refers to the mountain of the same name, and Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem that houses the Bezalel Academy of Art founded in 1906.
Przemek Pyszczek’s works reference the contemporary aesthetic of socialist apartment blocks in Poland and their transformation at the hand of their inhabitants. The ‘Facade Paintings’ refer to the particular facades that were embellished with motifs of progress and growth such as planets and plants in the wake of the collapse of the caretaking and planning ‘Father State,’ and which were further furnished with individual barred windows. Like the dysfunctional distorted climbing cages of the ‘Playground Structures’ they cross over into the visual cosmos of abstract compositions or constructivist statuaries of the modernist Avant-Garde. At the same time they criticize the aesthetic-forging efforts at reform, which merely concern themselves with the facades and not the architectonic or political conditions of life within.