Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
THE COSMIC RIFT
(2009)
Yehudit Sasportas
b. 1969, Ashdod, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv.
Acrylic on wall
25 x 69 feet
Evocative of the moody, wooded landscapes of the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, Yehudit Sasportas's stark black and white painted installations of forests, swamps, mountains, clearings, and caves are multi-layered and offer the viewer different levels of sensory and interpretive perception. More mental landscapes, as the artist refers to them, than physical panoramas, Sasportas is interested in using natural phenomena to show psychological states of mind. In a complex engagement with lived space, memory, and the liminal distances in between, her work functions at a level of subtle conflict, reflected in the binary modes apparent in it: visible-invisible, positive-negative, natural-unnatural, conscious-subconscious, idyllic-apocalyptic, poetic-scientific, calm-disquiet. This last pairing is encapsulated in the Freudian concept of unheimlich, or uncanny, wherein something is at the same time familiar and strange, resulting in a feeling of unease—a term very aptly describing the experience of Sasportas's art.
In The Cosmic Rift, the sense of fracture suggested by the title perpetuates these unsettling notions. Stemming from a scene from the Black Forest in Germany, where Sasportas often draws her inspiration, the work was constructed in the artist's usual method. Through a combination of sketching directly from nature, in the studio from a photograph, and from memory, Sasportas inscribes both a certain level of detail as well as a universal, non-specific impression. Her practice of taking sound recordings while on site and playing them back while working in the studio is evident in the concentric circles laid over the painting that pulsate with a subdued force. They act as the visual representation of a broadcast signal, radiating the implied sounds of the forest out yet, concurrently, also operate as a meditative tool to focus attention on the center, drawing the viewer in, thus setting up a dichotomy of inside-outside. The exterior is subsumed into the interior through a hole ripped in the cosmos, inviting the viewer to enter a different dimension, a dimension of the mind.
Sasportas has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, Domus Artium 2002, Spain, and Matrix 200, The Berkeley Art Museum. Recent group exhibitions include Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Sommer Show, Lehmann Maupin, New York. She also represented the Israeli Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
— Thien Lam