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Format: 125 Seiten , Ill.

Content: Sleepless presents six new commissions alongside a selection of previous works from the last two years in a site-specific exhibition of photography, film, drawings and three-dimensional objects providing viewers with a powerfully emotive environment by the contemporary photographer and installation artist Vered Lahav. Subtle references to the relationship between gender and identity and the use of objects are clearly visible in her new commissions such as Anatomy of Time I, a single photograph of a white paper envelope containing children’s milk teeth wrapped in a white lace handkerchief, which looks to tackle issues of innocence.A significant new series of six photographs called The Lovers I, shows books with yellowing paper purchased from charity shops, inscribed with sentimental messages from lover’s written opposite the bleak reality of the price of the book. Here the relationship of the material in the photographs is important, where they show a record of past and present romantic exchanges.Finally, in the series entitled Scrimshaw, a Dutch word meaning to ‘waste one time’ and a craft adopted by whale men in the 1800s, Lahav reflects on the whalers voyages taking a contrasting woman’s perspective of a personal passage and journey, looking at issues of femininity and traditional craft methods, continuing the ideas of innocence. Lahav’s work explores two contrasting yet corresponding elements of the modern city, that of the ‘maker’ (the architect) and the ‘user’ (dweller). Sleepless presents new research into this environment through investigating three core elements – buildings, women and men. By acting as a social observer of these themes, she challenges traditional perceptions of female and male individuality and relationships and their interaction with the urban environment. She is interested in telling stories of fantasy and reality, which suggest personal histories of individuals and families as well as universal themes such as childhood, myth, memory and desire. The title of the exhibition Sleepless refers to insomnia as an analogy for the inability to access a place of security, rest and recuperation.Lahav is best known for her beautiful photographs and unusual installations, where her notion of ‘less and less image can give more and more meaning’ through her use of pure stark white simplistic yet complex compositions. As with her previous work, Sleepless can be defined as a form of mixed-media collage, where the relationship between the placement of the images and objects in a three dimensional space is important. The exhibition exists less as individual components and more as a whole because of the specific dialogues that have been constructed between each image and object.

Language: English

URL: http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/whats-on/sleepless-by-vered-lahav/