Crossing Tel Aviv
- The people and their shadows play the notes of time on the lines of the crosswalk.
This is an exhibition from the series entitled, Crossings, which began in 2001 and will continue into the future, featuring content from international locations such as New York, Tel Aviv and Vienna. The concept of these geographical relocations was born in a show called Activation where I exhibited a live-feed video of an intersection in New York in the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan and on the Web for 3 months. Since that show the project has involved shooting video and photographs, focusing particular attention on crosswalks and other sites of urban transience, and then mirroring, looping and composing this material in order to generate new perspectives on these sites. This show includes 8 videos and 9 photographs, reflecting the themes of displacement, movement and time in the city of Tel Aviv.
The project's geographical relocations function as a type of mirror: one that doesn't reflect the other but is similar to the other. Duplication of urban spaces is echoing the way we dream to be free and the freedom is of time and death. Like the sculptural works of Robert Smithson, the geography of the source material's site versus the exhibition's site transports the viewer and allows for multiple points of entry into the work. In Crossing Tel Aviv the view is transported from the streets of Tel Aviv to the surface of digital space, the screen or window that contains the space of the video.
The distant perspective from which I film people evokes a sense of anonymity. They are actors in these video pieces, actors that don't realize that they are acting, and aren't burdened by the self-consciousness of acting. The traffic and the human motion are forming the Architecture of the change in the image. This is bringing the images to the surface, the tabula rasa.
As in Andy Warhol's Empire, the passage of time is primary in these works. Everything, including the city's motion, occurs in relationship to the sun, the rotation of the earth and our fixed point of view; the cycle of daylight fading to darkness fading to city-lights and its reverse is the key loop of these pieces. The metronome of composition is the sun's motion. This is the stage where words lose their meaning. Time is sculpting the videos into a post-narrative piece that is in a flux. This flux has a symmetry which evokes the international movement in Tel Aviv during the 1920's.