The impressions that places, people, nature or objects leave us are an integral part of the process of accumulating memories and associations of ideas. These make it possible to understand the process of production by the spirit of means of communication and of inventions.
The exhibition Languages of Environment proposes to associate the Israeli sculptor Avi Sperber and the American visual artist Suki Valentine, who appropriate the environment or nature in their artistic writing. Each in his/her process proposes a new language to decode or to reorient the perception we have of what surrounds us.
When Avi Sperber envisions the environment as a space to invest in connecting and relinking between people, Suki Valentine sees the environment and nature itself as rich resources of parallels to the human condition.
Avi sperber
Avi Sperber is an Israeli stone sculptor, active internationally. Engineer and designer of roads’ networks, his mapping connects people together throughout territories. He is inhabited by his practice and by his knowledge of spaces and of the substance of these places. Lands where in which we move and works in. His particular attention to the land and its resources is revealed in his sculpture work, using massive and natural materials as well as in his act of appropriation of the physical environment as an engineer.
"The stone, for Avi Sperber, is like a crack symbolizing perpetuity and the passage beyond temporality. (Doron Polak - curator)
Facing an increasingly virtual world, vast and fabricated by an interacted network of relationships, where each subject is in a ce-counts to multitude of other topics, Avi Sperber brings us back in his work to a direct relationship between people and their cultures, as between nature and the cosmos.
The artist also uses cartographies of famous sites located at important intersections in the world to translate traces, shapes and lines through the stone sculpture.
The era of digital mapping in range of Smartphone is also a source of inspiration to Avi Sperber. He uses waze mapping to create a new language sort of contemporary hieroglyphics describing our time.
Suki Valentine
The work of Suki Valentine is based on the contradictions that present in nature as a whole, with more or less degrees of complexity: for the artist, everything is a matter of dosage or of intention. In her Botanic series, the dose generates the poison, yet the plant can be sometimes for healing and sometimes damaging, evoking the power of life and death at once. The artist summons for this a series of avatars-goddesses embodying the poisonous facets of the plant, as metaphors of the darkest slopes of humanity. It is a question of no longer idealizing nature, but of considering it for what it is, endowed with a form of intelligence and conscience, peculiar to itself, distinct from human’s will.
With The Liminal Codex series, Suki Valentine invites us to take an initiatory path, navigating through the mysteries of our psyche and of our unconsciousness, in order to descend and transcend our shadows and our demons, looking to finally connect with the Living / and to Life.
It is at the price of this reconciliation with our environment, in recognizing it as a radical otherness - and inspired by the wisdom and philosophy of vegetation –confronting deepest fears, going beyond limits to imagine and to create new relationships, where humans will ensure their survival.