May 28th – August 29th 2020
"For all that is gathered meets here and is green
With grace, mercy and all your thirst for
Many years, missteps and turns and endless paths and no fulfilment.
For fulfilment is an ailment or a mere scam, and only
The chameleon alters its colors, yet pays no price." – Natan Zach, "Hymns to Green", 2012
Sigalit Landau , Green Scream, May 2020
‘Green Scream’, Sigalit Landau’s exhibition at Gallery Har-El, responds to “A Hymn to Green”, written by poet laureate Nathan Zach in 2012. A poem celebrating and lamenting human nature, especially the ripening and maturing experienced by the poet roaming/reminiscing his youth on the one hand, and harvesting the metaphors of his legacy.
In the new installation, the viewer encounters a sequence of manipulated found objects and site-specific sculpture. A weather-vane made of recycled street signs, stirring local disorientation in urban-wastelands, immersed in a grid of Judean desert livestock excrement; a cast flock of an invasive species - Rose-Ringed parakeets; Mediterranean dates and figs, barbed wire and cherries - different abject matter from the 70’s to the 90’s; mnemonics rise to the pandemic - trouble in ecotopia.
This “Dance into the Fire” is a post-apocalyptic circum-dance. It is what I felt needed done - What have we to lose? Even science is gob-mob-robbed for words: The anti baroque-like swing of chains in the exhibition is a cradle to barely stomached 21st century matter in the wake - to learn how much more can go wrong-and-roll far beyond the amiable “Hymn to Green”.
The poem signifies yearning to the nature of green, even though Humanity seems to do everything to destroy it. Absence of Nature in human lives drives us to a metaphoric relationship – contemplating the human nature. The bottom of such a well may be home of Althea, however, the view inside the well reflects only the naked unbearable truth.
In Zach`s poem, Mankind’s mental and physical existence is one with trees, flowers, fruit and roots, which connect us to a specific place and season. Trees and plants, even after the Corona crisis, will continue to provide us with air, food, clothes and furniture, light and shadow, and will continue forever to be the building-blocks for both our urban and human nature.
Following the period in which the virus demanded colossal statements regarding our conduct upon the earth and deep in the oceans, we were left to ask by what’s really significant and what must we try improve and change?
To me as an artist, it was important to feel how time stopped, to dance, in this show, in front of plague Genome. Being myself a prophet of the Apocalypse, a salty, un-verbalized worker and artist, when the Apocalypse is soaked with the scent of Alco-Gel, the past seems to be embarrassed and the future will never be the same - progress flees from the forum of History, “…… and only the Chameleon changes its colors without consequence”.