April 05, 2020
Nuance | 2018 - Ongoing
(A Sunday afternoon in our petit studio... )
February 10, 2020
Nuance | 2018 - Ongoing
June 29, 2019
Nuance | 2018 - Ongoing
March 12, 2019
Black Hole | Oil on canvas
28x28in (71x71cm)
When I think about a black hole, I try to picture this massive negative energy spinning in a midst of galaxies, drawing stars into its web and devouring them.
In fact, this negative energy is so dense that not even light can escape it...
This work is my translation of the idea of energy, and its sense of implied movement, into form.
A composition of movement.
I would like this painting of the Black Hole to serve as a vessel, transporting the viewer's mind to the center of this dramatic landscape.
February 20, 2019
Nuance | 2018 - Ongoing
A collaboration between Photographer/Artist Sigal Ben-David and Artist Les St. Leon.
Nuance - In French, the word nuance refers to shade, or a subtle difference of tone; it came into common usage as a reference to the blending of colors in 17th-century tapestries. Initially, it was used mostly for aesthetics, but it was soon borrowed to analogize, and then describe the meanings of words. it continued to broaden its use, describing the ambiguous degrees of difference in just about anything. This work aims to explore the role of nuance in an increasingly polarized climate.
January 07, 2018
My Playground of Others' Memories | 2014 - 2017
A collaboration between Photographer/Artist Sigal Ben-David and Artist Les St. Leon.
This new body of work entitled ‘My Playground of Others’ Memories’ comprises seven color
photographs shot in medium format. In this new series, created in 2014-2017, we continue to
explore the use of narratives for the construction of past events and attribution of meaning, the
role of memory in the interpretation and reconstruction of history, and their effect on personal
identity, and the political landscape.
In creating this new body of work, we drew inspiration from ordinary objects people collect,
such as artificial flowers, porcelain dolls, vintage tools, yarmulkes. Seeking to articulate the
nuances of relations embedded in the relationship between the inanimate objects that surround
us, that we collect and use in our daily lives and their role in forming our memories, while
experimenting with texture, pattern, substance, and arrangements, through which we generate
a dialogue between photography and FineArt, conceptual rigor and playfulness, representation
and abstraction.
By composite, and manipulated images of trivial objects De-familiarized of their functional
properties and removed from their larger schemes of meaning, we explore objects as
containing a profusion of meanings, while confronting with the abstract aesthetic structures
that underlie the natural and artificial environments. Rather than creating a traditional storyline
or narrative, this work reveals intricate and enigmatic mise-en-scènes that prompt personal
reflections on memories, and invite the viewers to construct their own narrative.
01
Figurines
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
02
A Night at The Opéra
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
03
White Wedding
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
04
Toying-With-Time Machine
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
05
Cube
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
06
Gathering
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
07
Tool Box
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
08
Field
My Playground of Others’ Memories
Archival pigment print on FineArt cotton paper | 28.5x28.5in | 2014-2017
November 28, 2017
Apparatus - Movement II | Oil on cardboard | Work in progress
October 05, 2016
Apparatus - Movement I | Ink on Paper
September 19, 2016
Woody Allen on Obsolescence
"My father worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him. They replaced him with a tiny gadget - this big - that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one."
Apparatus | Ink on Paper
July 25, 2016
Inside The Whale's Belly (The City)
July 12, 2016
March 12, 2014
move·ment
/ˈmo͞ovmənt/
noun
1. an act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed.
Synonyms: motion, move, gesture, gesticulation, sign, signal, action, activity.
2. A group of people working together to advance their shared political, social or artistic ideas. Synonyms: political group, party, faction, wing, lobby.
3. Music. a principal division of a longer musical work, self-sufficient in terms of key, tempo, and structure. Synonyms: part, section, division.
4. the moving parts of a mechanism.
ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from medieval Latin movimentum, from Latin movere ‘to move.’
Composition no. 5 / Mvt II Composition no. 5 / Mvt I
Ink on paper / 14.5x10.5in Ink on paper / 15.5x13.5in
2013 2013
March 11, 2014
Ink on Paper | Mechanism
Landscape Balzac The Helper Soul The Laundress The Sower
13 x 5 in 13 x 5 in 15.5 x 3.5 in 22 x 4 in 13 x 5 in 22.5 x 4.5 in
May 7, 2013
Thank You Note to Trisha Brown
Oil on Board | 23.5x23.5in (60x60cm)
2013
Bits & Pieces:
Ink on Paper
February 11, 2013
Trisha Brown’s Farewell
Posted by Andrew Boynton / THE NEW YORKER
There will never be another new Trisha Brown dance. In December, Brown announced that, owing to her declining health, her two most recent works, “Les Yeux et l’Âme” and “I’m going to toss my arms—
if you catch them they’re yours” (both made in 2011), would be her last. ...Since Brown formed her company, in 1970, audiences have watched with fondness as she has explored the possibilities of movement.
When the curtain went up on “Les Yeux et l’Âme,” and the audience saw Brown’s dancers begin moving silkily to music from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1748 one-act opera “Pygmalion,” backed by an immense abstract drawing by Brown, there was a palpable release of anxiety, a surrender to her inimitable artistry.
One of the hallmarks of Brown’s choreography is its appearance of effortlessness, and this is just as true in partnering as in solo movement. One second a woman was being swung through the air, and the next she alit softly on her partner’s leg. Such mini-dramas were evanescent; movement led into movement; stillnesses were never frozen.
That sense of life is ever-present in Brown’s work; you can often hear the dancers’ exhalations as they create the space and release necessary to achieve ease, and their risk-taking can make the pulse race. But alongside the visual magnificence is heart, and “Les Yeux et l’Âme” had plenty of it. The piece’s title—“the eyes and the soul” — comes from a line in Rameau’s opera, spoken by the statue to Pygmalion after she is brought to life: “In your eyes, I recognize what I feel in my soul.” What we see in Brown’s dances is honest, and beautifully imperfect. Near the end of “Les Yeux,” the full group danced as one, and it was unison of a different order: not mathematical and prescribed but somehow spiritual, inclusive. It was togetherness.
In the process of creating a new work, in 2011, Brown said at one point to her dancers, “I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours.” It’s a whimsical phrase, but it also has a dark cast, implying possession, not to mention unattached limbs.
...Although Trisha Brown’s company will continue to exist, and to perform her remarkable repertory, no one knows for how long. It wasn’t a farewell to life, then, just to life as we know it. Still, waiting for a dance that will never come will be hard.
(http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/02/trisha-browns-last-dance.html)
May 5, 2013
Electrical Landscape
Oil on Board | 33x38in (83.80x96.50cm)
2013 (On Going)
Electrical Landscape / Inside The Whale’s Belly (The City) -explore the dichotomy in man-made landscapes, in particular electrical power plants and urban topography. An illustration of
the duality of human nature. Utilizing color, grid patterns and abstract structures to underline the preception of light as a demonstration of virtue, and the dark as screening immorality.
Sketches:
Ink on Paper
A poem -
Life rolls on like this generator
ringing in my ears, electric.