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.
In her iconic self-portraits, Juliana Huxtable stages herself both in the poses of kitschy Christian posters akin to those on offer in Harlem bodegas, and as figures from anime and pop culture. Huxtable’s models are for the most part masculine figures, to whom adolescents look up. That they move fluidly among genders, and between analog and digital image production, does more than evoke these childish fantasies – it implies the possibility of their realization.