March 19 - May 1, 2010
Artists' Reception: Thursday, March 25, 6-8Performances at Zach Feuer Gallery: March 27 and April 3 at 4 PM
Zach Feuer Gallery, in conjunction with Stefan
Stux 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 taken 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. Disembodied
Archetypes, by Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, was published by Regency Arts
Press Ltd. in 2009.
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ZACH FEUER GALLERY
530 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
t. 212 989 7700
f. 212 989 7720
www.zachfeuer.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10-6
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