‘…There is something intriguing about the physicality of Aviv Yaron’s photographs. Even from a first glance at the jpegs, I liked his energetic mark-making activity. It’s echoing or fusing with deserted landscape imagery suggested to me an internal processing or reworking of something fractured or pressing to be reformed, that had happened in the external world.
Without reading his notes I found myself thinking about memory, loss and residual traces of past events.
This might be a projection of the ways I use the activity of making to connect with places that hold significance, memory, and a desire for belonging for me. But there seems to be something in common, in terms of landscapes that are repeatedly encountered, worked with and processed. Also in terms of an impulse to make visible in the work the scratches, blemishes and surface details that communicate a physical struggle to arrive at a true account of something that is more than just an observed record – One that uses layers and imperfections to represent the layering of inner content onto the observed.
It’s exciting to come across work of a completely different subject-matter, that none the less resonates, makes sense and feels familiar and whether or not projection is involved, it indicates how the metaphors that Aviv uses extend beyond the personal to speak of more universal themes of exile and belonging.
Getting to understand about the relationship of Aviv’s work to Israel, Palestine and his own history is very moving. Somehow he has found a way to articulate the complexity of relationships involved in the places he has revisited there and to allow us to feel them speaking powerfully and poetically through both images and time.
I like the way small details in the foreground like weeds, barbed wire, scratches on the surface imply a kind of threshold behind which lies the land and in front of which stands or lies the person giving form to the place through their presence and attention. In the backgrounds too there’s a kind of texture or gestural echoing of the forms of the landscape that mean it also has been mediated by the awareness of the maker. It brings you into a more visceral relationship to place, atmosphere and artist…’
Susan Derges (Uncertain States: Open Call 2016)
Mile End Art Pavilion
Clinton Road, London
E3 4QY
4 – 12 November 2016
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm
Private view Thursday 3 November 2016 6:30 – 8:30 pm