Processed digital photographs, archival pigment prints, varying dimensions, 2022-2025

The Contemporary Art Gallery, Ramat Hasharon, Israel
Curator: Rachel Sasporta

Bardo is a concept in Buddhism describing the stage between death and rebirth. For me it represents an intermediatory stage ‮–‬ between the impulse to live and the yearning for dissolution.

The void is not nothingness; it contains within it the past as well as the future. I sought landscapes in which I could experience this space, the internal and the external.

This time I wandered afar. In the winter of 2022 I travelled on my own to a small strip of beach in Tenerife. For ten days I injured my knees on the black sea cliffs that seemed to me like burnt black palaces. Already at the time I was shooting I aimed to deconstruct the landscape and build it anew.

The works are large in scale. Each photo is composed of multiple images. I wanted to create a fantasy that does not conceal the frayed layers and cut edges. The fragmented landscapes emerge from a black background, signifying for me the end of the world as an abyss of oblivion.

In the summer of 2023 I spent two weeks, once again on my own, in Iceland. The northern island offered a different experience--the colors were various shades of gray and the disjointed image gave way to a more meticulous frame. I searched for side roads skirting the well-known sites, and descended to remote shores, to lakes with drifting remnants of glaciers afloat, and to volcanic plains of black basaltic sand. There was only me, the landscape, and the sounds of the water and wind. I placed the photographs from Iceland in passe-partout frames in order to grant them the stature of traditional landscape photography.

I then became acquainted with the small and captivating Geological Museum of Ramat Hasharon (Israel). There, inside wooden display cases, are countless collections of crystals--amazing potential miniature landscapes. Who needs to journey far. I equipped myself with a folding portable mobile studio and was received at the museum with open arms. Through the use of various Photoshop techniques, I turned the minerals into distinct, symbolic landscapes. Color returned to my work in all its splendor.

At this stage, with three separate bodies of work different from one another in appearance and technique, I realized they could be intertwined. I embedded crystals I photographed at the Geological Museum in the gray landscapes of Iceland, and rocks I shot in Tenerife were incorporated into square frames and underwent abstract treatment resembling the museum’s small crystals. Scale and proportion became distorted.

The deception is not fundamental, but allowed me to move through the bardo and expand the possibilities of creation.

Through acts of selection, erasure, and construction of something out of nothing, subject to both control and randomness, I sought to create a world that maps post-apocalyptic soulscapes, turning the knowledge of the end into a moment of enchantment.