“Artist Adina Kay is attempting to shed the binding shell and break through with her new exhibition.”
The serious viewer at the TZAV TZEVA TZABA exhibition of works by Adina Kay shows that the title is not just a play on words. The enigmatic patches of color on the walls are analog images, abstract color fields and stencil-like shapes simultaneously forming a female turtle’s shell. This image is repeatedly formed and destroyed as the viewer watches, embodying a mental order – a Tzav (homonym of Hebrew male turtle), as a kind of operating instructions to the artist as well as the viewer to break through the borders of the stencil and liberate oneself form the constraints of the image.
Adina Kay creates mythical color fields of scorched liquid soft-hard earth. From various sized papers black and brown clumps of color shoot out, taking over and occupying the white paper. Often a small clump of color patches is pushed into a corner, at other times it is large, threatening to spread through the space. It is a sort of Mother Earth rising up to battle the void, or a black womb threatening to swallow everything up, so powerful it has no limits. The seemingly closed solidity that that artist creates is an illusion: it touches, threatens and broadcasts its threat outside of its borders. Adina Kay places patches of color one on top of the other with a sure by suspicious hand, with cautious touches – a precise stain with deliberate edges is placed on a melting watery color stain, with qualities of transparency vs. opacity, light vs. dark, light and airy vs. earth-bound heaviness, tiny dense patches over large expanding areas.
Adina Kay is attempting to shed the binding shell and break through. She has selected the turtle image and repetitive action to accomplish this goal. Her works are created as if by an internal construction and demolition order through paint, while her art-making poses the question as to whether we can free ourselves of the bonds of the image, which, like the turtle, has existed from time immemorial…
Opening hours:Sunday to Thursday: 10:00 – 14:00 and16:00-18:00Friday: 10:00 – 13:00
Shoham GalleryCurator: Hannah Shir1/10-28/10
