Gallery talk : 19.2.2022

Noa Yafe's solo exhibition "White Feather" features reliefs, photographic works, and sculptural installations interwoven in the white gallery wall.

Through the presented objects' elusive approach to reality, Yafe offers a new perspective on her ongoing preoccupation with illusions. In the exhibitions "The Shadow" (Raw Art Gallery, 2016) "The Perfect Crime" (CCA, 2017), and "Revulsion" (Tel Aviv Artists' Studios, 2019), the technique she had developed - installation disguised as a framed photograph - pointed to the false representation of reality under the capitalist system. The current show illuminates other aspects of the perception of time and place: here, now, behind, through, above, within.

From a set of concepts and forms, not entirely deciphered, a possibility is formulated: a gate within a gate within a gate, a circle within a circle within a circle, a Bird of Paradise, the undulations of mountains in the limbo of dusk.[1] While the camera captures a moment from which we are moving away, the ongoing structuring of the camera's image in matter invites, through the spectacle (and via the gate), passage into a spiritual frequency. Space becomes a container for the viewer's consciousness:

Good Knowing Counselors, the emptiness of the universe can contain the forms and shapes of the ten thousand things: the sun, moon, and stars; the mountains, rivers, and the great earth; the fountains, springs, streams, torrents, grasses, trees, thickets, and forests; good and bad people, good and bad dharmas, Heaven and hell, all the great seas, Mount Sumeru and all mountains - all are contained within emptiness. The emptiness of the nature of worldly men is also like this.[2]

Noa Yafe (b. 1978) lives and works in Tel Aviv. Yafe received her BFA from HaMidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl, where she also completed her post-graduate studies in 2012. Her solo exhibitions include venues such as CCA Tel Aviv, MoBY (Museums of Bat Yam), and RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv. Yafe's works have been exhibited in various group exhibitions around the world, among them the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, Tel Aviv University Gallery, Primary Projects in Miami, Artists' House in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Artists' Studios, Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv, Bat Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism, Minshar Gallery in Tel Aviv, and Paint Box Gallery in New York. Yafe is the recipient of several scholarships and awards, including the Artis grant and the Young Artist Scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. Her works can be found in public and private collections, including those of the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. An artist book, edited by Joshua Simon, has recently been published by Mousse Publishing.