Rockefeller – Musrara 2017-01-23T20:50:10+00:00

Project Description

Rockefeller – Musrara

2004
Printing plates, wax, lead
14/14/2 cm – 28/28/2 cm

 

This series evolved from printing blocks discarded by the Rockefeller Museum, wooden tablets with metal bulges including representations of elements documenting archeological digs, such as site maps, written tablets, tools and other finds. Beyond the archeological world where there is always more than meets the eye, the reversal of left and right and the juxtapositions connect areas of the blocks’ shapes in strange and puzzling ways, positive and negative, a kind of Rorschach mark inviting observers to a journey of investigation and estimation from within their personal and collective subconscious storage. In the creative process, the blocks are enveloped and preserved by means of lead cases cast in wax, both materials with historic connections to printing processes that have additional contexts: lead as an isolating material, heavy and toxic; wax as a mediating material expressing vulnerability, and transformed from solid to liquid and back again through heat. The metaphoric process by which the blocks were discarded through the museum’s back door was later reversed when this work entered through the front door, displayed as a “special exhibit” in the Rockefeller Museum entrance. The full series was exhibited in the gallery of the Musrara Art School, thereby expressing the dialogue between the art and archeological worlds in two nearby locales, situated on opposing sides of one of our most illusory and fraught divides – the Jerusalem east-west seam.