current exhibition.
OBSESSION
Jane Labaton
Curator: Ilana Carmeli Lanner
14.8- 12.9.2020
Jane Labaton is a designer and artist of contrasts. Contrasts created out of her obsession with beauty and freedom versus the use of recycled materials and obsessive repetition, with the help of motifs that represent the beauty of life that fades and disappears in her feelings. Through the design elements of Labaton it simultaneously brings the viewer closer and farther away and shapes the illusion of aesthetic beauty, but it is impossible to prevent it from being inviting but at the same time deterring due to the texture and presence of the entities protecting the chair. In this exhibition, which is presented for the first time in Israel called OBSESSION, Jane tries through the metamorphosis of discarded materials to create an illusion of beauty and aesthetics in furniture details that represent the impossible with the three motifs that run like the second thread in the exhibition: the chair, butterflies and script. The use of discarded materials and objects and the transformation they undergo under her hands in manual work at a repetitive pace has become an incessant obsession. With the help of disassembly, recycling, hand-cutting of tens of thousands of shapes, painting them over and over again until the color is absorbed, revitalizing the materials into an endless fabric of fragile but unattainable beauty. The beautiful chairs that cannot be sat upon. Butterflies that are creatures full of charm, color and lightness that undergo a worm-like metamorphosis into a beautiful entity that disappear from the universe within a few weeks. The letters that are part of a monologue that Jane creates with herself about her works, her fears and the angels and demons in her life. Jane Labaton, a native of Britain, acquired her education in Paris and continued her informal studies of art and design in London and Montreal. Labaton has exhibited at longtime group exhibitions in London Montreal, New York and Paris.
Photography by Ran Yehezekel