As Jessica's partner and the person who closely accompanied the entire process of building the body of works till the final exhibition, you might guess that it allowed me to have an inside look into the intricacies of the works and their creative process. But in my feeling, and despite my closeness to Jessica's creative process, I am no different from the casual observer in the sense that this exhibition was created in a kind of strange evolution, and until the moment all the pieces of the work came together, it was not at all clear to me what this exhibition was supposed to look like.
The attempt to paint on glass at first seemed to me to be the amusement of an artist with a healthy curiosity and love for the material, and what began as a kind of game after about five years turned into a production that includes many participants in media that completely broke the boundaries of painting in objects, a show that includes acting, dance and videos, and a catalog that is actually an artist's book. The exhibition not only covers different media and disciplines but also spans the world in collaborations with people from Argentina and in connecting artists from all corners of Israeli society. To me, this points to Jessica's uniqueness as an artist: to be grandiose and pushy for boundaries while at the same time maintaining the innocence of her artistic endeavor.
Nonetheless, as someone who was given the privilege of watching the creative process from the sidelines and up close, and as someone who provided the raw materials for the work, I will try to present some insights that come to me in the advanced stages of building the exhibition.
There is an inherent tension in the body of work between the representation of a political subject and the complete opposite of it. Jessica plays with the viewer in a kind of hide-and-seek or guessing game and tests our endurance in the face of the encounter back and forth with landscape or abstract images with a seductive aesthetic versus images of horror, and disturbing content from areas of conflict and war, doubt in Israel and doubt in Argentina. This is reflected in the way the works are presented, which reminds me of children's games in which objects rotate on their axis and reveal the other side.
The transition between about 150 works (which is actually 300 if you add the other side) in this obsessive pendulum movement between emotional states, between the need to take a stand in the face of a complex scene and the ease of a painting that is only "beautiful" echoes in the viewer the existential schizophrenia that is embedded in every Israeli as part of our defense mechanism against the chaotic reality around us.
This duality that exists in the body of work takes on another layer in the strange connection to technology. As someone who supplied Jessica with the "leftovers" from the production lines in the technology factory where I worked, I can feel the forced connection between the delicate and passionate paintings and the coolness of the technological objects.
This connection can be demonstrated in a specific work in which the lens is used as a kind of metaphor taken from the world of optics and technology. In the work, the viewer looks at a miniature painting on glass showing a girl in a pink dress standing against a background of soldiers. Above the painting lies a heavy cracked lens. The girl who looks at us through the lens, and the strange light games load the horror scene with another layer of identification and emotion allowing us a glimpse into the girl's emotional world. The girl with her gaze manages to soften the lens that faithfully represents the cold and emotionless technological world.
But this particular lens hides another layer. The use made in the world of technology for this lens is to split the light source in two, hence its name - beam splitter. The lens reflects some of the light rays at 45 degrees like a mirror and some of the rays pass through it. Thus, the image that passes through the lens splits in two: part of the light passes, and some is reflected. This technological application in industry allows one light source to be used for 2 functions simultaneously and is commonly used in optical measuring instruments. The beam splitter that separates us and the painting creates a physical and emotional experience of a split between us and ourselves, which resonates in the scene of the girl against the background of the soldiers. In fact, two modes of viewing the work are created: one that looks directly at the scene beyond the lens and the other that observes ourselves and the space around us as a mirror. Thus becomes the world "through the mirror"—the painting itself simultaneously with our reflection.
Again, the doppelgänger appears.
Another example of Jessica's use of technological equipment is in "staging" a violent situation towards the paintings themselves. In some works, the painting itself appears as a victim taking part in a torture scene inside the jaws of the machine. As an internal artistic act, the paintings take on the dimension of "painting as an object" and go beyond the boundaries of presentation to represent the victim in the artist's strange roleplay. The painting ceases to be a painting and is animated by the tortured figures that appear in the paintings. Thus, the painted glass is given the role of the "tortured soul" by the machine that represents all the evil in humanity. The choice to corrupt the paintings under the hands of technology may allow for another layer of reading, even if she is unaware of Jessica's perception of the place of art in today's technological society, and perhaps as a more personal expression of her place within the Israeli art world.
In some of the works, the paintings are assimilated into the production facilities that serve them as a kind of prosthesis. The strange hybrid of anodized aluminum* in metallic blue color, designed in 3D simulation and made using milling technology in connection with sometimes broken glass with fragile portrait images or landscapes, is another option for animating the paintings offered by Jessica. This strange connection between the technological and hard metal and the literally fragile painting cannot produce anything coherent, not on the material, visual, or moral level. But Jessica forces these things to connect, and as a result of this encounter, the work is charged with tremendous tension.
This takes me to a particularly favorite painting of Jessica: Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors," in which the people of knowledge and power of progress are seen modeling the best of technology at the time with a skull smeared on the foreground of space and loading all that goodness with horror.
As someone who has worked with the devices and experienced both worlds – artistic and technological, this connection in the works makes me uncomfortable on the deepest level. Not only in the personal sense subjectively, but also as a collective and metaphorical statement of the social reality in Israel: It reminds me of the dissonance between our desire to be portrayed as a high-tech nation that trusts progress and technology and the chaotic reality in our country, which makes it very difficult to realize this vision as it seems especially since January 2023. On the one hand, we are constantly busy conveying strength and resilience in the form of technology and industry, and on the other hand, our soul is broken inside, as the glass works.
The works offer no solution but only point out the problem by pushing the finger into the wound. Those who try hard can perhaps find a glimmer of optimism in the look of the girl in the pink dress, in the warm and passionate colors, even when they appear as a representation of human horror and suffering, and perhaps in some of the works in which heroic figures suddenly appear who resist and fight the injustice around them. Glass is perhaps a metaphor for our personal and social resilience, just as fragile and transparent as it can carry the full weight of the complexity of our lives through Jessica's paintings, and on both sides of it. them. Glass is perhaps an image of our personal and social resilience, as fragile and transparent as it is able to carry the full weight of the complexity of our lives throug
*A layer of aluminum oxide created by an electrochemical process on aluminum parts. The coating has high wear resistance, good anti-corrosion resistance and electrical insulation for high voltage at high temperatures.
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