The Julie M. Gallery is pleased to host Beneath the Tranquility as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Beneath the Tranquility features the works of two prominent Israeli photographers, Deganit Berest and Shai Kremer.
Deganit Berest spearheaded a generation of Israeli artists whose work would come to shape the art scene of their country. Working in a former diamond-cutting factory, her choice of studio reflects the pursuit of a faceted, pixilated ideal within her paintings and photographs, which are characterized by liminality, stillness and stasis. Using the trope of the ubiquitous pixel, Berest confronts the schism between today’s reality and its parallel, the digital world.
From the initial stage of image taking, Berest further develops the photos with the aid of a computer, to create images constructed of a grid of large scale pixels. Berest is interested in reaching a threshold where the viewer might oscillate between seeing the work as ‘meaningless’ geometric abstract shapes on the surface, but then, suddenly, might experience recognition that these seemingly random stacks of cubes become a specific image.
Shai Kremer’s celebrated World Trade Center Concrete Abstracts (WTC) are created through a massive layering of numerous images of the World Trade Center site during reconstruction. WTC hones in on the epicenter of the destruction carrying forward to the rebuilding of one of New York’s iconic sites.
By documenting the process of reconstruction at the site of the 9/11 attacks, Kremer encapsulates his interest in photography’s ability to function as both an historic archive and mediator of highly politicized visual information. Taken over the course of many months of continuous shooting, the images evolve and devolve. In the process, there appears to be a serene calm in a world of chaotic images.
Julie M. Gallery for Contemporary Art 