I have always been fascinated by power, being an Israeli, I guess it is unavoidable. In my work, I have been searching to try to understand why my entire culture and I seem obsessed by it. I initially chose to investigate this obsession with authority by focusing on the Israeli glorification of military might through depicting weaponry and other military paraphernalia in my work as well as by photographing my work in site at an Israeli military training field. More recently, I have begun investigating power in relation to sexuality and gender and in the process I have shifted the point of view in my work from a collective one to a more personal point of view that is predicated on directness especially as it relates to the body’s carnal and spiritual character. Inspired by an older generation of artists like Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman, Hermine Freed, and Nancy Spero, I’m interested in representing the body, especially the female body in art, in relation to its needs and activities while retaining its sensuality, darkness, and authority. I begin with a network of personal associations that inspires a mixture of representations. I combine contrasting physical and associative elements in a way that works against establishing a linear narrative, preferring instead to use the logic of images against themselves to represent ideas that are arrived at metaphorically and phenomenally. The scale of my recent work also allows me to simultaneously represent personal experience in a larger cultural frame of reference so that it makes a kind of common “emotional landscape” that incorporates individual associations with the situation of the work and viewer. In addition to my paintings, I recently begun to explore print and performative video work. I find it allows new elements of time and space into my work. I do not want to be obligated to one medium, my ambition is to expand my practice to include gestures that invite an increasing sense of confrontation, referring to history, and society while retaining the more subtle personal insight and emotion that are at their core.
