Naomi Leshem: Frozen Sands
Naomi Leshem's exhibition Frozen Sands presents large scale color photographs taken in the snowy landscapes of Switzerland, a country where the artist spent long periods of time both as a child and as an adult, and in various Israeli desert sites around Beer Sheva and the Arabah. Looking at each of her magnificent photographs, one can discern a conscious effort to trick the beholder's eye, to direct her or his gaze and focus it on some point in the landscape: a lonely tree, a hill set off from its surroundings by its different color, furrows, stripes of herbs, or tire tracks of passing vehicles. The photographed landscape seems to document a nature-made artwork, in a similar way to the recording of signs left in American and other desert landscapes by Robert Smithson in his environmental works.
Leshem's flattened landscape and the intense blue surface of the sky that meets the white surfaces of snow or sand dunes bring to mind landscape paintings of Ori Reisman, Michael Gross, and Mark Rothko. Similarly to what happens in their works, three dimensional material space is replaced with two-dimensional image, which, in her case, translates natural textures into the materiality of photographic paper and into a false illusory image. The splicing of these textures reflects an abstract poetic thinking similar to that of "poly materialist" artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Alberto Burri.
Another optical illusion is created by the contrasting dialogue born of the juxtaposition of the desert Negev and snowy Swiss landscape photographs within the three spaces of the Trumpeldor Gallery. For a moment it seems as if we are dealing with one and the same landscape digitally manipulated or filtered. But Naomi Leshem does not use Photoshop and digital editing. Hers are analogical photographs scanned digitally and printed without any further processing. The frosty sand and the glaring snow are frozen in time in a way that only a camera can capture. Freezing the scene immortalizes as it were the sublime, primordial presence of her landscapes. It lends a static dimension to the scene's dynamic components. In concrete reality, sand dunes constantly migrate and snowflakes thaw and melt; "everything flows." On the other hand, in pictorial reality, everything stands still.
The English gerund "freezing" refers both to the solidification of liquids at zero degree Celsius or below and to the stopping of human or mechanical motion. The word has a third meaning, relating to the capture of a "decisive moment," which the photographer chooses to freeze and immortalize as an image on the surface of the photographic paper.
There is something disconcerting to the eye and disturbing to the peace of nature in her photographs. This "something," a potentially terrible-dazzling threat, is another, meaningful component of the freezing present in her works. As one's eye wonders along the textured paths of the photographed landscape, one's gaze stops dead, freezes, in front of this illusory surprise. And at this moment even the desert sands freeze…
Prof. Haim Maor, the exhibition's curator
Biographical Notes
Naomi Leshem was born in 1963 in Jerusalem. Education: 1987 – graduates from the Photography Department, Hadassah College, Jerusalem; 1984–1985 – General and German Studies, Fribourg University, Switzerland. Awards: 2014 – Mifal Hapayis Arts and Culture Grant; 2009 – The Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Since 1993, her exhibitions have been shown at venues such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Rietberg Museum, Zurich, the Norton Museum of Art, Florida, Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv, Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York, Ncontemporary Gallery, London. Her works are held in public and private collections both in Israel and abroad. Lives and works in Kiryat Ono.
