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.
Sean Crossley’s paintings stand in the space as figures containing complex, immersive abstract systems. His reflections upon being an IVF child inform this work, an experience of both excess and lack of fathers. Embracing this multiplicity, the works resist the representation of any singular narrative or structure of fathering, but rather aim to generate productive, performative spaces where ideas such as growth, influence, extension or becoming can be put to play outside of any genealogical structure.