Please join us:
Thursday, March 25, 6 to 8 PM
for the OPENING of: Miki Carmi + Tamy Ben-Tor
Disembodied Archetypes
March 25 - April 24, 2010
In Simultaneous Collaboration With:
Zach Feuer Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, NY
Salon 94, 12 East 94th Street, NY
Performance
Dates at Stux
Gallery:
Saturday, April 10 at
4:00 PM
Saturday, April 17 at
4:00 PM
Tamy Ben-Tor + Miki Carmi, Paintings, Performance, Video, Photography
Stefan Stux Gallery, in conjunction with Zach Feuer Gallery and Salon 94, is
pleased to present Disembodied
Archetypes, a two-person exhibition
of new performances and videos by
Tamy
Ben-Tor and new paintings and
photographs by Miki Carmi. All of the works in this exhibition are bound by a
series of photographs and texts that embody the dialectic of the archetypical
and the concrete.
The artists state: "Disembodied
archetypes deals with the performance of the poet as a monotonous daily routine
of useless acts for the purpose of creating a kind of 'primitive theater,' or
a 'one man theater,' that endlessly strives to deny death by the intensity of
action."
Neither the grotesque
proportions of these heads nor the idiotic manner of these performances imitate
life. Rather they aim to imitate the dynamic of thought. The mind's conception
of reality, like a warped mirror in a circus booth, could reflect, as in these
works, an irrational, absurd reality and yet a true one in that it is how the
mind perceives.
It is through irrationality that
the senses grasp truth and it is the role of the artist to make a true image -
one which is not literal or descriptive but real. Perhaps the image of the mask
best describes the theatre and the painting in that through it the unreal
becomes fact and the banal divine.
The
performance of the poet is a daily act of repetitious rituals that embodies, in
his work, the intensified condition of being.
In the theatre of death, the
disembodied is the subject stripped from its context and thrown into an empty
arena (in which the canvas or the stage function as a magnifying glass) so that
he may be examined, objectified, made protagonist or condemned.
The
paintings are death masks that have been intensified by painterly events and
transformed into a grotesque 'one man theatre without an audience' which is
re-enforced by the performance as a collage of impressions, quotations and
imitations of idiotic moments.
Both are immersed in the real through the disciplined act of quotation
and gives rise to the unleashed psychic ready-mades.
"As if under a warped magnifying glass
We
wish to intensify and mystify these fragments of reality.
The
image is a poem and the poem is a frozen moment in time."
Tamy
Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi were
both born in Israel and currently live and work in New York City. An artist
book accompanying the exhibit,Disembodied Archetypes, by Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, was published in 2009
by Regency Arts Press Ltd. Stefan Stux Gallery and Zach Feuer Gallery will host a
reception for the artists on Thursday, March 25th from 6 to 8 PM.
For further information,
please contact Andrea Schnabl at Andrea@stuxgallery.com