Looking for Nature Exhibition

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We live in a time when we minimize the importance of nature in our lives. In history every human culture used to be in touch with, and honor, the spirit of nature on which it totally relied for survival.  Depending on the earth in their daily lives as peasants, they had to “listen” and understand nature in a way forgotten a long time ago by us in the western world.

The exhibition “Looking for Nature” presents four women artists who are all influenced and inspired by nature. Is there a special connection between women and nature, and if so what does it look like? In history, most of the deities that had to do with nature - forests, the earth and flowers, were goddesses in mythologies such as the Baltic, Celtic, Greek and Native American. “Mother Nature” is such an example, a personification of nature, focusing on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature, by embodying them in the form of the mother. Similarly, in ancient Greek religion, Gaia was the earth-goddess and the indigenous people of the Andes honor Pachamama as Mother Earth.

In early cultures Earth was seen as a woman with two faces: the first one was passive and nurturing and the other wild and uncontrollable. They knew then what we begin to grasp again today; nature is more powerful than human beings and cannot be controlled.

In more recent times the relation between women and nature has been examined in feminist literature. The eco-feminist thought, a social and political movement that puts forward a common ground between environmentalism and feminism is one such example. Susan Griffin was among the firsts to explore the identification of women with the earth in the late 1970s. She compared the oppression of women to the destruction of nature.

A different view of nature was put forward more than three hundred years ago in the philosophy of the Jewish thinker Baruch Spinoza. In the history of philosophy he was named a “pantheist”, claiming that everything real such as nature, humans and the universe is divine, and God is everywhere. His writings Ethics, completed in 1675, are considered the most complete attempt at explaining and defending pantheism from a philosophical perspective. One of the many interpretations of Spinoza during our time is the perception that everything in nature is related in an eternal cycle; spirit and matter, soul and body, human and nature.

The four artists in the exhibition, like certain scientists, understand the incredible source of  “knowledge” that nature is. Biomimicry, for instance, is a discipline of science in which one studies nature's best ideas and imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Scientists are trying to learn how to store energy like a leaf on a tree, or build ecological housing inspired by African termite mounds. They say that nature - animals, plants and microbes – has already solved problems that we humans are still trying to find answers for. We would have a better future if we imitated the natural world and made our world work more like it.

Einat Amir and Sagit Mezamer exhibit works whose process started this summer (2011) while attending an Artist-in-Residence program in the Swiss Alps. Far from the summer heat of Jerusalem and the politically charged landscape of Israel; 1,191 meters above sea level, in the Lower Engadine valley outside Scuol in the canton of Graubünden; in the countryside, surrounded by the forest and the river Inn that runs through it, they found a special connection to nature.

Einat Amir’s (b.1980 in Ramat Hasharon) works on paper which are part of “Looking for Nature” are based on photographs of the mountains and river she took in Switzerland,  as well as photographs of the endless forests of Finland and nature here in Israel. She composes together all these pictures by making digital-collages in black and white. The results of this process are fantastic landscapes where nature takes over and has no logic. On these she draws with pens, scratches and glues wallpapers, adding yet another dimension, a colorful one, to her representation of wild nature.

Sagit Mezamer (b. 1974 in Acco) exhibits “Sanctuary # 1”, a group of works that includes drawings, photographs and a video-projection, presented as an installation on the wall. Mezamer discovered that the Scuol Palace Hotel adjacent to the Artist-in-Residence was abandoned by its last owners who were Orthodox Jews. They had left in a hurry leaving behind pieces of life all over the building. The artist sees the hotel as a container immersed in the dominant nature surrounding it. Sagit Mezamer wanders around in the hotel, explores it and takes pictures of it. She is looking for nature within the house, and finds it on a wall; a poster of a view through a window, making one watch a snowy mountain landscape. Small texts are incorporated into the drawings and photographs that she shows in this exhibition. These texts are sentences from the play “Brachland” (Barren Land) that made its way into her works. “Sanctuary # 1” is the beginning of a dialogue that she has with the author of the play, Berlin based playwright Dmitrij Gawrisch, one of the other artists participating in the residency. In the play two brothers Ivan and Oleg travel to a new place, a non-place, that is infertile and rough and where it is hard to survive. The play is about their fight to manage in this place.

Sharon Balaban (b. 1971 in Jerusalem) exhibits four video works. In the works “Tree” and “Untitled (rabbit)” (both of them from 2007), she explores nature by picking out only part of it and giving it another meaning. It is as if we are looking at the tree and the rabbit through a pair of binoculars and we only manage to find a bit of them, the ears of the rabbit and the lower part of the tree trunk. In the work “Banana” (2005) Sharon Balaban has taken the camera outside once again but this time she has given new life to a banana peel. By holding the banana peel in her hand moving it up and down shown in slow motion, it becomes some kind of animal resembling a bird. Just like her other three works in the exhibition, her fourth video “Untitled (pasta)” (2002) gets up close to the object and moves in a slow rhythm. Because of this, the works create an intimate feeling, as if you are the only one present at that moment, the only one to experience it. The pasta in the work is the kind called Conchiglioni which looks like a shell. The cooked shell-looking pasta is turned into a living creature; it could be an animal that lies down breathing, or a slowly moving snail.

Ayala Landow (b. 1982 in Jerusalem) exhibits a series of sculptures both standing on the floor and hanging on the wall. For her works she uses objects that once had a function, adds different materials to them and makes them her own. Ayala Landow takes us on a ride, she mixes the outdoors with the indoors and actual things with the unexplainable. We become confused but soon realize that it is not important what her sculptures once were. The sculpture hanging on the wall looks like a bookshelf but inside it we find paintings of mountain landscapes together with synthetic wall-to-wall carpet and small sculptural objects. Mountains return in the sculpture, part of which was once a stand for a flowerpot, now instead of a plant there is a globe with embroidery on the top. Another sculpture makes a reference to what could seem like a tree or a palm tree; on the bottom of it there are stone-like structures made of papier-mâché. 
Like the other artists in “Looking for Nature” Landow takes from nature and makes it her own kind of nature. One could even say that the artists examine themselves through nature.