Naama Arad

Naama Arad

Work from his/her oeuvre.

“I am interested in art as an experience, both intellectually and sensually, and thus I create installations surrounding and containing the viewer; building a sort of setting for one to be “present inside of. In these installations I always try to create new locations by which the “self is represented in its surrounding objects and decor. I use different elements from architecture and interior design, as I believe that both fields provide a reflection of our psychological state as individuals, as well as a society. I am interested in the different relations of power that are reflected in the way a certain room or a space is aesthetically organized. In the various structures surrounding me, I can identify a certain hierarchy or a balance of power, which is attractive and .repulsive to me at the same time.

I’m not interested in designing something pretty, but rather, in how the concept of “pretty” was chosen for me by archetype designers, who in my case, have always been men. Being that I am a woman, my position is that of a daughter conducting a survey of all possible patriarchal figures around me. In my ongoing search, I am both submissive and aggressive at the same time, allowing .myself to be fascinated with the surfaces of reality, regarding positions such as power and status.

I build extensive structures out of small, everyday paper to emphasize the contrast between the grand, yet also exorbitantly extreme, very human desire for monumentalism. I feel this intensity for “the grand” is strongly connected to my ongoing fascination with American culture. I see Israel as a weird conglomeration of different cultures from around the world that has also been .extremely Americanized. For me, the “Motherland” has always been America.

In my work “Har Hazofim”, I produced a scene of a window reflecting Mount Rushmore. In addition to the representation of the American nation’s fathers, it is also a reference to a cinematic moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The large scale image is produced out of many small A4 papers joined together to form one big monochromatic picture. By separating and rebuilding the image myself, I tried to emphasize two important points: the first revealing the modern grid, and with it, the original thought that led to the construction of the monument in .reality, and the second is the splitting and the dismantling of the powerful uncontainable image The president’s faces were then covered with a peach chiffon curtain that colors the picture in a ,flesh tone, emphasizing the dissonance between the stone and the fabric, the hard and the soft the male and the female.” – Naama Arad