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Artzy shows ‘1,000 faces of Israel’ |
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Written by Shlomit Kriger
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Wednesday, 01 April 2009 |
TORONTO – Hundreds of Toronto residents enjoyed a journey through “The 1,000 Faces of Israel” at Artzy, the second annual multi-media art exhibit held Mar. 22 at the Bata Shoe Museum.
Bridging local Jewish artists from diverse backgrounds, the event featured a wide array of artwork, including sculptures, paintings, photography, jewellery, and interactive installations.
“Considering everything that has been going on around the world, at schools and in the Jewish community, this event helps to show how dominant multiculturalism is in Israel and how multifaceted Israel is,” said Artzy Coordinator Rotem Stark, a program associate for Hillel of Greater Toronto. “It’s nice to be able to come together for this kind of celebration in Canada and see the beautiful sides of Israel and it demonstrates the great strength and commitment of our community.”
Tamara Winegust, a fourth-year Image Arts student at Ryerson University, produced digital photographs portraying various aspects of the Jewish lifestyle.
The first piece, Hitorriri, displays a young religious woman praying silently at the Western Wall. The photograph includes a poem about being at the Wall and living in Jerusalem that Winegust’s sister Adira composed while spending a year in Israel in 2007. Winegust’s other sister, Yardena, helped place the poem on the photograph using calligraphy and black ink.
“There are people from many religions in Jerusalem,” said Winegust. “You wake up there every morning hearing the Muslim call to prayer and the ringing of the church bells, but never really hearing any Jewish call to prayer – it being a very sort of silent, very personal thing.”
Winegust’s other two pieces, titled Andy Warhol, meet my Bubbie, are manipulated photographs. She took the famous image of Andy Warhol’s “100 Cans” and put it into a Jewish context using the popular Manischewitz soup cans.
Lennon Friedman, a visual arts teacher at Glenforest Secondary School, contributed three of his oil paintings for Artzy that touch on his identity as a Jewish person and artist.
He created a painting entitled Puzzle Portrait using a collage of his elementary school photographs.
“The painting provides a playful reflection of my journey from a private Hebrew school to a multicultural public school in Thornhill,” he said. “The overlapping puzzle pieces signify individual growth and identity.”
Friedman produced his two other paintings, These Thoughts and Mary, during his thesis year at an off-campus program in Italy, where he created many sketches of and studied the Italian Renaissance artwork that he viewed in the museums. While he wasn’t interested in Christianity from the religious sense, through these pieces he attempted to “modernize the classical representations of the religious icons in my own style.”
Israeli-born architect Maier Yagod put together an installation piece called Talkback, which allowed people to browse hundreds of comments in English and Hebrew that readers of articles on Israeli Web sites had posted during the recent war in Gaza. The installation included music from West German comedy crime film Die Dritte du Generation (The Third Generation), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
“Our mediums of conversation have become seemingly more democratic and dispersed with a growing amount of viewer constructed content entering our communal consciousness,” explained Yagod. “Times of political unrest are typical for a growing amount of input on behalf of the virtual citizenry.”
Keeping guests immersed in Israeli culture, Artzy also featured dancers, a band, Israeli hors d’oeuvres, and paintings created live throughout the event by Danny Richmond, a program manager for local young Jewish adults centre The House. University of Toronto Art History Professor Adam Cohen also addressed the crowd, providing a deeper glimpse into some of the showcased pieces. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 April 2009 )
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