Artist Avivit Segal has created an installation comprised of dough objects and photographs as her solo exhibition at the Periscope Gallery. She makes bowls of sourdough kneaded and opened by hand to a semi-transparency, remaining as fragile as possible, full of air. Segal has taken material meant for a familiar purpose and empties it from its usual content, as she defines new content with old material. The border, the resulting membrane (the “crust”) is the content itself. Her process of testing borders, emptying out and distilling enables the artist to create a new space which becomes the site of dialogue between present and absent, fullness and the void, defining and defined.

Processes of subtraction, burning and minimizing are reflected in the photographs as well.

 

In creating the project Through the Void, Segal invites viewers to momentarily become assimilated into the cyclical environment she creates which also exists within herself. This environment is abstracted from the mechanical precision characterizing capitalist processes of manufacturing, distribution and consuming, refusing to become standardized and unified. She has installed dozens of hollow bowls made of bread dough (like severed, disrupted hemispheres), heaped up into crisp heaps and unstable pyramidal stacks, looking like a ravenous sensuous outburst likely to spread out like an overflow of bubbling fermentation.

 

A similar environment is reflected in Segal’s photographs on view, associated with the cycle of life and nourishment. Her technique of overexposure, lightening the picture and eliminating many details from the original photograph removes much extraneous information, creating an envelope of light giving the feeling of softness and magic. One of her series in round format is a close-up of grains of wheat covered with transparent protective plastic sheets. The grains peeking through seem to be simultaneously the surface of another planet and thin golden grains of sand. The ever-changing scale in her project Through the Void generates thought about the cycle of life, not as an enforced, fixed repetition, but a cycle which welcomes the new in a process of constant renewal.

 

With special thanks to Stybel Flour Mills and the Tishbi Winery Bakery

 

photograph by Avi Amsalem