Ouzi Zur, “Close One Eye”
Haaretz Literature, 8 April 2016
Yaara Zach – “In Daylight”, Curator: Lea Abir, RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Yaara Zach’s sculpture exhibition, curated by Lea Abir, is pure delight. This is sculpting of perfect entities, willfully clinging, vulnerable, to the floor, passively yearning the domineering view from above of the exhibition visitor. These are not individual sculptures but rather a sculptural installation, almost frozen in time, consisting of two antagonistic elements – one was completely sculptured as a finished whole, colorful and bright; the other is monochromatic, temporal, a tattered assemblage of readymade components, and its vulnerability is even greater than the first’s. One is feminine, containing the masculine, the other masculine containing the feminine. It is soft, seemingly vulnerable, sculpturing. As two kinds of choreography they are spread on the floor – one spinning round as the other crawls ubiquitously.
On the gallery floor a low stage was built from black wood, intensifying the theatrical, ritualistic dimension of Zach’s sculptural installation, while slightly protecting it at the same time. To the left are spread two bright dresses, one red and the other yellow. The skirts’ spheres are flattened, creases pass through them, and in their midst a kind of punching bag transforms them into a giant nipple, a masculine punching bag in the eye of the feminine vortex, and the entire statue is resurrected. But then you notice that one hanging loop is missing, and if the sculpture were hung in the air it would be crooked, and all its glorious, feminine-masculine beauty is tarnished and annulled.
From the other side slithering in all directions are a pair of rugs (against the pair of dancers), without definite borders or shape, woven out of hundreds of men’s belts, a crisscross that merges and unravels into islands engulfed in the darkness of the space, except for the glittering metal buckles. It doesn’t take much to imagine the belts and buckles as snakes. A closer look reveals alligator and snake faux leather imprints. The belts’ tongues slide from fragment to fragment and beyond the rugs, woven in a feminine handicraft domesticating the savage masculine.
These are silent powerplays of dominator and dominated (even beyond gender), shedding their skin and successively exchanging roles. The smell of leather fills the air, yet the material in the exhibition is merely synthetic leather.