Uri Zamir's solo exhibition "Echo my Dear Friend" takes place within four walls and a pillar, in a time that is a non-time and a place that is a non-place, in a twilight zone that may be called "imagination." How can we comprehend what we call "imagination?" At the exhibition, Zamir places a series of similar sculptures of dogs, seemingly born of the same father. Be it the creating father – the artist, or the same prototype – the original mold, from which dozens of particles were cast or splintered. Each dog is a fragment, a part that captures the general logic and the origin's DNA that has generated all these sculptures. Why did Zamir require imagination? Imagination in the sense of similarity presumes difference; otherwise, it would have been sameness. The dogs resemble one another, but they are also different, resulting in mutual reverberations, like in a mirrored room of strange reflections, which establishes their existence as a pack, a dog society with community life. They circle each other, sniffing one another's bottoms like in a celestial star system.

The dog is the most ancient animal to be domesticated, but as a member of the wolf family, it maintains some of the predator's traits. Perhaps because of the 30,000 years of shared history, the two species have become wound up together. The unique relationship between dog and man is that it can read signals and emotions, or maybe the ability to do so has been what tied the two together. Either way, according to the Maharal of Prague, this rare sensitivity has been the source of its Hebrew name ‘KeLev’ – ‘As a Heart’, or 'All Heart.' The heart is perceived as where personal and private emotions reside, but according to Sufi philosophy, the heart is first and foremost where images live, meaning that the heart's role is not to feel but to see and predict. It is not for nothing that the heart sits within the thorax, the term for which in Hebrew resembles the words for 'the house of the seer.' The psychoanalyst James Hillman wrote in his book The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992): "The heart is not exactly the location of personal emotion but the residence of true imagination, vera imaginatio,  which reflects the world of the figure in the microcosmos of the heart. Emotions awaken when the images begin to move." What does a dog possess that it is identified so closely with the organ that imagines it is a heart? Perhaps it had been the first being people found themselves similar to? Reflected in? Has the dog breached humankind's loneliness, created an echo in those hearts, and turned into a witness confirming our existence?

The prototype of Zamir's dog sculptures is a dog of the Saluki breed: a spirited hunting dog with a long nose whose genetic heritage echoes the memory of the local Canaanite dog and Anubis, the Egyptian god, who had a human body and a wolf’s head. Anubis was the god of death, and his role was to weigh the hearts of the dead on the scales of justice against a feather so that a person's heart had to be light and polished. Unlike the mythical dog, sacred, sensitive, and feeling, Zamir's dogs are opaque, and their gaze is hollow. They function as a faint echo of that glorious genetic charge that once resided in them as an active ingredient. What is the essence of a dog if it does not feel? All that remains of it is the image.

An empty image, yet what does it still hold?

The mythical state preoccupies Zamir in all his works, and they resemble a hybrid between ancient thought, which attributes a spirit to the object, and contemporary thought, which sanitizes the spirit of the sculpture and treats it as inanimate while revealing a comic quality in it (how hilarious is a dog show). But when he intends to sculpt a dog - meaning a living being - Zamir demands that the sculpture be alive, alert to action, in a continuous present tense. The sculptures are named after the action they perform, all of which are known Hebrew phrases: a dog looking backward, Burying its head, pissing in a well, rising above itself, Sun in Givon Stand Still! A gradient of dogs spreads out as if captured by the magic hour, absorbing the light of a burning sunset. Perhaps the sun also stands still, persisting in its action - to set.

Uri Zamir (born 1993, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Tel Aviv. A multidisciplinary artist, his body of work consists of sculpture, performance and video installation, where myth, space and theater are a central motif in his work. graduate (BFA) from the Fine art department, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (2019) and the student exchange program at Tokyo University of the Arts. He has won various awards and scholarships, including: 30 Under 30, Forbes Magazine (2023), Young Artist Award, The Israeli Ministry of Culture(2023), Mifal HaPayis, Artists’ Greenhouse, Herzliya  Museum of  Contemporary Art (2021), Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts (2020,2021), Honors Fellowship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (2019) ;Lineen S. Cooper Prize for Excellent Artists (2019)  And a scholarship from Tokyo University of the Arts. Exhibited in exhibitions in museums, galleries and alternative spaces, including the solo exhibition “Delirious Sailing” at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2022) "Crater's Belly" at Rosenfeld Gallery (2021),“Chasing pavements” Loving Art Making Art (2021), Fresh Paint Fair - Independent Artists Greenhouse (2021), Solo Exhibition " From the Collection of", Studio Bank (2021)," Disform ", Fain 3 Gallery (2021)," DETERMINATION ", Edmond de Rothschild Center (2020), Night Light Festival (2020, 2017)," Seven world ", The Jewish Museum in Munich (2020), Indie Gallery (2020), Print Screen Festival (2019), Light Festival in the Old City of Be'er Sheva (2018) and more.