essays/reviews

"Painting in-sights" by Simone Osthoff

2012-01-08T20:19:44Z

Looking back at us with a mixture of intent, fear, and defiance, Hagit Barkai’s paintings increasingly implicate viewers in the process of seeing. Her haunting images do not smooth over disruption and anxiety. Instead, they open the abyss between knowledge and unintelligibility. Such figures of discomfort and vulnerability knock us down and make us wonder: Do these pictures fictionalize or give testimony to events? Why are couples crowded in picture planes? What is provoking someone’s urge to vomit? Is the repetition of certain scenes an emphasis, a cinematic sequence, or a form of reenactment? And what are we to make of blurs, shift of focus around edges, unfinished figure/ground relations?

In Memory, History, Forgetting, the French philosopher Paul Ricouer examined the relationship between remembering and forgetting, while questioning how historical narratives overly remind us of certain events at the expense of others. He pointed out that imagination—our ability to imagine and to form a mental picture—has a double meaning. On the one hand, imagination signifies fiction, fantasy, visualization, and on the other hand, it is equated with memory, recollection of prior events, and the experience of remembering, as such (as the iconic dimension of memory itself), which is the opposite of forgetting, effacing, and erasing. In art, life, and increasingly in the production of historical narrative, these two meanings of imagination are entangled and progressively combined in our collective mediated and largely unconscious memory.

In Barkai’s work we sense this history in distress, no longer with the certainty of a linear temporal sequence. Without the possibility of asserting fiction or non-fiction, her images point to the epistemological crisis of not trusting one’s own eyes. The artist’s effacing or erasing body parts further emphasizes the opacity of the medium and destroys the illusion of pictorial representation—the assumption that images are transparent windows into “reality.”

In contrast to the fast-paced flux of technical images, which include design, photography, cinema, video and digital animation, made with ever more sophisticated options for manipulating them, Barkai combines nineteenth century classical technique with contemporary scenes of discomfort and intimacy, which she renders with a beauty that simultaneously move, disturb, and seduce. Her pictures collapse skin and surface as well as the distance between the slower “breathing” life of the body of painting and the living bodies, screaming or laughing depicted on her canvases.

By focusing on ambiguous and anonymous identities whose bodies are the locus of political and power conflicts, she explores inner contradictions that are at the same time religious and political, social and ethical, philosophical, psychological, and emotional. These images share the charged territories explored by a few other contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, William Kentridge and Shazia Sikander. And although these artists are not stylistically related, they share a certain disillusion and melancholy, as they expose break-downs and violence, rapture and ecstasy. Their deeply complex imagery engages art making and narrative from a well of social conflict, in which history and personal stories are inseparable from the gestures of drawing and painting. Here, image making and writing divide the same original meaning of in-scription, and in-formation, which the philosopher Vilém Flusser explored in the essay “The gesture of writing.” Barkai echoes this shared origin of drawing and writing through painting in-sights.

Simone Osthoff is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Visual Arts at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium, 2009.

Herald Weekly: Professors display works spanning mediums, purposes

2011-11-23T19:39:14Z

Posted by CW Web Admin on November 22, 2011 in A & E | 0 Comment

by Katie Orlando

Religion Professor Hun Lye and Davidson student Audrey Gyurgyik guide private viewing rooms at the opening of Hagit Barkai’s exhibit in the Van Every Gallery, “It looks Something Like This.” The oil paintings will be on display until Dec. 7. (Courtesy of Hagit Barkai)

Walking into the Van Every Gallery at Davidson College, will take viewers out of their comfort zones. The faces looking back at them from massive canvasses will not soothe them. This art is not reassuring or peaceful. It will make viewers uncomfortable and maybe a bit nervous.

And if the artist is successful, it will make them think.

Across the hall in the Smith Gallery, easier viewing of a series of prints might be a safe-haven from the jarring faces and starkness in oil.

Barkai explores personhood in oil

Davidson College Assistant Professor of Art Hagit Barkai’s exhibit in the Van Every Gallery, “It Looks Something Like This,” features oil paintings of human subjects. Many are naked, posed in pained, forced states.

“In-Difference: real, not real, real,” depicts two naked subjects. They might be a man and a woman, or some combination. They are huddled, curled into the smallest versions of themselves. They are in a corner, maybe of a closet, maybe of a massive room filled with torturous dangers. Their faces are tired, resigned and scared. But they could be looks of defiance. Barkai’s ambiguity forces the viewer to think and interpret her paintings.

The crisp lines of these subjects’ legs in the forefront get sketchier, fading into impressionistic blurs.

Blurred features are a common thread throughout “It Looks Something Like This.” In “Bedside: Blindfold 2,” a man kneels, his face is thick brushstrokes flying away from his head, oil vomit in place of features.

“I almost never decide to blur parts of the painting in advance,” Barkai said. “Most times I actually have the goal to say everything in a painting. All these blurs and erasing are things that happened in the process of painting and I felt that it is done, that if I say more the feeling will be lost.”

The theme of “It Looks Something Like This,” is “visual representation and truth, the failure in explaining something, the difficulty in telling an intelligible story while telling the truth,” Barkai said.

For the exhibit opening, on Nov. 3, Barkai orchestrated intimacy between viewers and paintings. Davidson student Audrey Gyurgyik and Religion Professor Hun Lye acted as stewards for private viewing rooms. In one room, two canvasses faced each other with a chair in the center. Gyurgyik showed one painting after another to one viewer in the chair.

Lye brought a ticking timer into another room, with one viewer at a time, a couch, a large painting and a wall-length mirror. The viewer sat facing the mirror, with the painting behind him, allowing him to watch himself observe the painting of a naked, graying man staring back.

“I wanted to do something with intimacy and comfort, and I liked the idea of privacy in the middle of a reception,” Barkai said.

Brian Garner shows collaborative art

If the anxiety, confusion and intense emotions on the faces of Barkai’s paintings become too much, viewers can find some refuge across the hall in the Smith Gallery.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Brian Garner operates the Litho Shop in Baltimore, Md. He teaches three courses at Davidson and works long weekends in Baltimore once a month.

Artists come to Garner’s shop to “investigate their conceptual subjects while provided the technical support necessary to translate their visual language into original prints and multiples,” according to its website.

“Brain Garner: Collaborations from the Litho Shop,” features pieces that Garner has worked on with a wide range of artists in a variety of print media. Works on display include lithography, relief, intaglio (etching) and screen-printing.

“The process starts by meeting with an artist and finding out their needs as far as the medium,” Garner said.

Garner works with artists to find the right medium for them and then introduces them to the materials.

In the lithograph medium, for example, artists can draw with crayons or pencils, or use photographs and digital transfers. It leaves a lot up to the artists.

“They bring their own curiosities and intuitive relationships that they make with the materials,” Garner said. “No artist really approaches making prints the same way as another. They all have their own answers to questions they ask themselves when they come to work in my shop.”

Bill Flick’s “Devil #1” and “Pig Bat” immediately grab the eye. The bold black and white lines form unforgettable eyes and evil grins. But lacking humanity, they remain separate from the viewer.

If Barkai’s exhibit aims to rattle viewers and make them think, this exhibit primarily entertains, staying on a noninvasive, pop culture plane.

Ingrid Burrington steps out of the frame with “Endless Tomorrows.” A roll of paper, salvaged from a Crayola crayon label-printing factory, stretches from floor to ceiling, repeating “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and…” The plaque explains that this piece represents the impossibility of a moment or memory remaining a fixed, unchangeable point. Tomorrow will not be tomorrow for long.

Liliana Porter began with a photograph of a Pinocchio-like figurine to create “For You.”

“On top of the photographic element of the print, we used a technique called drypoint, a form of etching,” Garner said. “The drypoint image was drawn directly on a plate. Bringing the artist’s hand into the imagery created a sense of intimacy. … She has the capability to take objects that have no soul or life to them and puts them in situations where we can relate to them on an emotional level.”

The exhibits will hang until Dec. 7. The galleries are open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and weekends from noon until 4 p.m.

Charlotte, NC Creative Loafing, Nov 8 2011

2011-11-09T02:18:24Z

It Looks Something Like This exhibit at Davidson College

Posted by Anita Overcash on Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 11:31 AM

A viewing of Hagit Barkai’s It Looks Something Like This exhibit at Davidson College’s Van Every Gallery conjures a sense of uneasiness. The mostly nude figures — with faces somewhat blurred — convey feelings of vulnerability, apprehensiveness and disarray through the canvasses they embody.

Barkai - born and raised in Israel — currently works as an assistant professor of art at Davidson College. She draws influence for her figurative art forms from her upbringing in Israel, as well as aspects related to body image.

“I grew up in an environment with strict restrictions on the body, its expressions and its movements. This has always been underlying themes in my paintings,” Barkai says. “There is also the Israeli ethos of victimhood and growing up to learn about realities of victimizing, which have been a tone in my paintings since I came to the US. I find that I see the people in my painting and sometimes the paintings themselves as victims, but free at the same time to leave or choose how to be in their space.”

A haunting sentiment of disruption and entrapment (within ones own body, more so than an invisible captor) is evident in these works. In “Blindfold,” a woman blindfolded and unclothed kneels on the floor with her hands tucked away behind her back, while in “Beside: Touched,” a naked man (his face - mostly blurred with brush strokes of rusty orange - appears frightened) awkwardly places his hands to cover his exposed genitals. Another work, “Beside: Day Of,” captures a young woman kneeling with her body bent forward, placing her sullen face to nearly touch the floor.

An assortment of ideas related to the body have influenced Barkai. “The idea that the body is saturated with interests and self-images that can be traced visually by looking at the way we organize our bodies in public,” she says. “The idea that there is a resistance towards these images that comes from the body and has no clear linguistic expression. It comes in the form of awkwardness and failure to assume these images.”

Though most of the works in the exhibit are displayed in the open gallery space, others can be found in two smaller connecting rooms. Barkai requested these be built and created specific pieces (like the one pictured below) to occupy the space.

The title of the exhibit stems from a recent trip Barkai took to Israel. Upon finding her old diaries, she discovered old drawings with the caption “It looks something like this.” “The word “something” was thickly underlined to stress that it is not really “like this,” as if to say, don’t think for a minute that you know what it’s really like, just from seeing the image,” Barkai says. “I thought this line was perfect.”

To view past collections by Barkai, visit www.hagitbarkai.com. Exhibit continues through Dec. 7. Davidson College (held in Van Every Gallery), 315 N. Main St., Davidson. 704-894-2519 .www.davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org.

The Art of Hagit Barkai: Between the Abject and the Sublime, by Surpik Angelini

2011-02-03T03:27:25Z

Israel was the birthplace and cultural crucible where Hagit Barkai witnessed meaningful battles waged in the name of selfhood, as well as deaf and blind walls erected to keep the Other out. A growing rift between the culture of the Diaspora and the culture of the Settlers happening while Hagit was growing up, seared her psyche with a thirst for truth. While in college, she turned first to philosophy in search for answers. But, writing, she discovered, favors an omniscient gaze that tends to silence the Other. Art, instead opened doors to finding an ethical balance in her relationship with the world. Thus, since the year 2000 Hagit Barkai paints.

The art of Hagit Barkai centers on mysterious and why not? mystical processes that underlie personhood: she reveals to us glimpses into other beings, instances when their becoming drifts to the surface. It is no surprise that Hagit chooses to paint the human body, grounded in the rigorous tradition of Western figuratve painting. Yet, in her work, there is a deliberate departure from Modern canons. Her point of view and her creative process are philosophically rooted in what Heidegger termed "Dassein" or being in the world. Since Dassein, requires authenticity according to the philosopher as well as " a kind of situadedness that involves both the discursive meanings of a cultural field of significance and the corporeal experiences of an embodied subject", (pp.9, Irigaray and Deleuze; experiments in visceral philosophy, Tamsin Lorraine) Hagit, in her own search for authenticity, explores both the sensual and cultural situatedness of her "self" and her subject. In “Home is a Metaphor: there is a quest for greatness” from 2009. we find a young couple dressed in costumes that bring out their cultural differences as well as their “gendered” attitudes. The young woman is posed a couple of steps behind the young man, as if in a submissive mode. She is sheathed in a white tunic, with a headdress that evokes an Andean woman or a "cholita's" garb. He appears assertively dressed in a contemporary, flaming red suit, seeming to complacently exert dominance in the scene. Yet, in this provocative “mise en scene”, where the subjects deliberately perform their parts, the artist captures that instant when the masks drop and an inner spark illuminates the uniqueness and depth of each player. To the viewer, it is evident that an exchange took place between the artist and the couple: this particular and unexpected instance of self awareness is a shared one. Here, in this in-between space, the space of becoming is where the artist finds the fertile ground for meaningful exchanges between subjectivities. Selfhood exudes from human exchange, not alone, not from the outside, nor from the inside alone, but from a meaningful dialogue. As the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray states it " a sexual ethics would treat the body's contact not as a corpse but as something living: angels maintain the body's contact with the divine by mediating between the mortal body and its infinite valuable contact with the sensuous world" (pp.40, Irigaray and Deleuze)

The painter, desires no particular prefixed idea of her subject, but to explore the infinite variety of unpredictable sensations, a "jouissance", a feeling of “ giving herself in the moment to be shaped in a manner she cannot predict" as Irigaray puts it, “the sensible transcendental in the feminine subject, a dynamic becoming” Thus, insofar as the artist is solidly rooted in the here and now, she explores a fluid, ever changing intersubjectivity. In this sense, Hagit accomplishes Irigaray's idea of every little girl’s dream of achieving intersubjective communication. Technically, this is stressed as we approach her canvases, noting how the artist consistently adopts a one to one scale, triangulating a one to one relationship between canvas, her own presence and that of her model, thus allowing herself to witness and trace transformations occurring in each other’s space. An example of this kind of psychological transference happens in “Beside:Touched” from 2009. A pale and evanescent standing figure of a naked young woman, appears frozen as she covers her genitals with her hands, in a gesture of shame or timidity, while her facial features are clouded in a red stain. The artist's decision to erase the face evokes not only her subject’s particular condition, but it echoes loaded cultural images, spanning from Lucas Cranach’s Biblical Eve to the recently overexposed photograph of the humiliated naked male prisoner in Abu Greib, Irak. Thus, the particular and the universal merge in a powerful cultural statement in this work.

Seen in a contemporary art-historical context, Hagit’s art reflects a tendency towards the abject, as in the figurative work of Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas, painters whose subjects are magnified or reduced in scale tending towards voyeuristic portrayals of the dark side of human nature. Instead, Hagit's taste for the abject is intimate, empathetic. As the artist choses not to minimalize, or magnify the subject’s scale, she avoids creating precious icons, which tend to symbolically reduce the particular to some form of essentialism. Thus, her paintings not only capture the subject’s sensuality, but also register momentary absences, accidents of unselfconsciousness, subtle truths that make the subject- and artist unique. In fact, as these truths touch upon the abject, we see that the dark side of an occult intimacy opens only in moments of trust, instances when the vulnerable self lets go of its boundaries to admit the possibility of the other’s gaze. We can catch these glimpses in “Cross: Chances (no matter how many times) from 2009: the portrayal of Siamese twin babies, fatefully entangled as they gasp for breath; or in “Beside: Entrance” from 2009 an oversized naked female model, posed unbalanced, as she sits facing the viewer on a small stool, or in “Home Metaphor: why wait?” from 2009, a profile figure of a naked girl stooping towards the floor, her long black hair cascading downwards in a fury of expressive, downtrodden, messy strokes.

In spite of her academic and deft representational skills, the artist seeks to flee from the constraints of the frame or the one point perspectival renaissance window. Instead, she attempts to merge the picture with the gallery's blank wall, joining the viewer’s space, not through the theatrics of a "Caravaggioesque" depth, but through the dissolution of the picture’s boundaries. In fact, she frees the unpainted margin of the canvas from its stretcher to show underpinnings of her spontaneous, expressive brushwork and subsequently her paintings are transformed into wall hangings. With this gesture, the artist invites us to enter a space-time where "generation and regeneration" takes place not only in the here and now of the “mise en scene” where her art experience happened but also where our own experience as viewers takes place.

Hagit Barkai”s creative process brings to mind Luce Irigaray’s description of a "place for love" stating: " The body is always touching upon new ground It cannot help but be continually feeling and losing itself in the immediacy of the experience it has never already had. In this opening up to thoughts .feelings and sensations that can never be anticipated, one may lose the illusion that one has a familiar and repeatable shape that has an established place in the social matrix. But one opens up to a new kind of possibility: the possibility that all socially significant possibilities cannot contain one , that one is perhaps not containable, that one indeed touches upon the divine." (pp.39. Irigaray and Deleuze) It is in this sense that Hagit Barkai’s work spans the improbable distance between the abject and the sublime.

Surpik Angelini is an artist, critic, independent curator and director of the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas.

Gallery catalog: Hagit Barkai "Resistance" by Nau-haus Art Editions.

The Need For Additional Support, by Jenni Rebecca Stephenson

2010-07-03T03:00:00Z

Absolutely in the Loop Magazine. by Jenni Rebecca Stephenson

Every day when we get dressed in the morning and look in the mirror, we face the issue of body image. So ingrained in us, it manifests in our walk, facial expressions and even in the way we relate to others. For personal or societal reasons, we often pair our body’s demand for support with aesthetic enhancement.In fact, some may even say that Victoria’s secret is necessary engineering! But, what is the relationship between support and enhancement really about? What are the motivations and results of this interplay? Attempting to address this question, Additional Support at Spacetaker’s Artist Resource Center features the paintings of Hagit Barkai, body casts from Kelley Devine and the small metal body ornaments of Jessica Jacobi.

All three artists are currently Houston residents, but Barkai’s roots are in Israel. Both a student of art and philosophy (receiving an MFA degree from Penn State University and a B.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), her work has been shown in exhibitions across the country– most recently, at the Art League Houston. Kelley Devine splits her time between art, motherhood and her entrepreneurial endeavors. She studied sculpture and visual arts at Southeastern Louisiana University and has been exhibited at various shows in the South. Jessica Jacobi is a homegrown Houstonian, having received her training at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tech University. She has been exhibited at national juried exhibitions, as well as at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft where she has been in residence.

Recently, we took a moment to ask the trio a few questions about themselves in relation to their art.

1. What is your biggest inspiration as an artist?

Jessica Jacobi (JJ): I am preoccupied with the relationships we form with our bodies, because it is through these relationships that we perceive the world. I constantly question our notions of acceptable body conditions and challenge accepted ideals.

Kelley Devine (KD): My inspiration comes from my life and how I feel about society. Art helps me be honest with myself.

Hagit Barkai (HB): I don’t think I got over him just yet. In opposition are the bodies around me, the subtle way they express themselves, the evasive ways they convey information.

2. Who or what has been the most influential to your work?

KD: The people around me are the most influential. Plus, I study many other artists and our environment. I love feedback!

HB: My teachers, painter friends and lots and lots of paintings have moved me over the years. Different philosophies and feminist writings have also influenced my process.

JJ: Those who are most dear to me play the most influential role. Observing the behavior of family and friends has opened a window into observing myself. This fuels the questions and subjects in my work.

3. What’s your favorite part of being an artist in Houston?

HB: The artists and friends I have met here and the fact that I can dedicate most of my working time to painting in my studio. Plus there are so many things going on here, many of which I don’t know about yet.

JJ: Houston’s size and diversity yield a range of opportunities for practicing artists. There is a welcoming attitude in this city and I find that very motivating.

KD: Houston Rocks! We have a lot of opportunities to show, learn and work here!

4. In your dream world, you would...

KD: Be respected for my work and able to support my family

with it.

JJ: Be able to share my work and interests with a large audience, and in turn, be exposed to their thoughts. So far, teaching has proved invaluable for this exciting process.

HB: There are some feminist writers that I would like to collaborate with one day.

Additionally Sublime, by Dean Liscum

2010-06-04T02:46:00Z

From the blog: Is It Beautiful Yet? MAY 28, 2010

The Facebook invitation for "Additional Support" at SpaceTaker's ARC Gallery curated by Lindsey Peyton briefly described the show as "exploring the body's need for support - for aesthetic enhancement, for physical augmentation, and for societal acceptance - and demonstrating the tension between an acceptance of and repulsion to the body." Before seeing the show, the title did not move me. In other words, it didn't tap into my psyche and conjure up any pre-conceived notions. After experiencing the works, I felt the repulsion and felt the support was somewhat ironic. Corsets lined with nails, painfully pretty-fying prosethetics, and portraits of mental, physical, and psychological discomfort aren't exactly the kind of support anyone would want, be they fierce feminist or your average wallflower. It's the kind of support that women have been struggling against since Adam turned to Eve as they were being expelled from the garden of Eden and said, "that pelt makes your butt look big!"

Kelley Devine uses the irony of surrealism to rebel against that type of support. A multi-dimensional artists, her works in this show are sculptures, which I'd roughly describe as enhanced body casts and paper bikini's. (She's an excellent 2-D artist as you can judge for yourself at her website. http://www.kelleydevine.com/...one of the ironies is that Kelly Divine is a self-proclaimed "big butt pornstar" as I discovered when I misspelled Devine's name while googling her.)

The casts aren't subtle, but they're graceful. Imagine a Sports Illustrated model's breast and midriff fashioned into a corset. The inside is lined with nails creating for the potential wearer a figure if not to die for at least to suffer for. Both the theme and the technique are repeated in several other pieces. "Father" is a back replete with nails on the inside and the Lord's prayer scrawled along the spine. "Dressed Down" consists of chrome buttocks and lower back with nails on the inside, the ensemble resting on a petticoat. My favorite piece of Devine's, "Extended," is an arm span raised to 5 feet with white translucent fabric suspended from it and light illuminating the work from underneath. No nails.

The bikini's are playful casts in the same way the sculptures are beautiful, with a nail-jagged twist. Each piece is fashioned from the pages of a different symbolic text. "Wearing His Name" consists of sheets from a hymnal. "35 Fits Me Better Than 25" is made from a treatise on aging. "Nothing Left Hand" is select pages from the artist's divorce decree, and a fourth is fashioned from a dress pattern. The works resonate with a surrealist irony that echoes of Magritte--beautifully-crafted, beautiful and cruel.

For her part in this dialog about support, Jessica Jacobi (I couldn't find a website for her but I found her on Facebook) applies the notion of enhancement to herself. Her works explore the manipulation of the body through decorative machines. She's meticulously manufactured these wearable sculptures, which she refers to loosely as "jewelry" and installed them as standalone sculptures. However, the works come alive when they're put to work.

In a running video installation, Jacobi demonstrates the effect of each piece. This performance includes how one would apply such "jewelry" and the temporal effect that each piece has on the wearer after it is removed. The work is ornate, but scary as demonstrated in the piece used to advertise the show, "Cheekbone Enhancer." This pinches the check, pulling the cheek and lower eyelid from the eye and exposing the red connective tissue surrounding the socket. As she applies these enhancers with names like "Lip Plumper," which crimps and pinches the lip, "Dente Drip," which I'm not sure what it's enhancing but it involves a lot of fake blood, and "Pitter Pat," which binds to her ear, to her own body in the video, I try to maintain a scientific distance, circumnavigating both fear and fetish. The most playful of which is "Breast Sacs," two pendulous nylon sacks filled with scented vaseline and dangling from a clasp that one fastens to their person at either breast level or belt buckle level depending on your personal preference for the placement of pendulous appendages.

There's no hiding it. The re-figuring is dis-figuring and disturbing. If you've seen "Brazil," "Children of the Lost City," or even "Dead Ringers," you can imagine the conceit. The cruelty of the process is innate in the tools used to perform it and achieve the desired result. The wearable sculptures themselves have a medieval feel. Their own aesthetic alludes to the fact that neither the results nor the process are "natural" or "pretty." They're both quirky and quietly unsettling, which makes them oddly engaging.

Hagit Barkai wrestles differently than the rest.

I'm not proud of it, but as a viewer I'm relatively comfortable with gore and repression. Perhaps, that's too much psychological information on my part. Nevertheless, society's permissiveness and my viewing choices have rendered me thus. And thusly, I found Hagit Barkai's work (http://hagitbarkai.com/ the most disturbing pieces in the show. They're neither as surreal nor as direct as Devine and Jacobi's work. Yet, for me they are more viceral. Perhaps, it's her somber pallet. Perhaps, it's her mixture of oblique gestures and obscured facial expressions. Perhaps it's the ambiguous spaces that her figures occupy. Perhaps, it's all three. Nevertheless, her works inspire just the right amount of grief? uncertainty? fear? to momentarily disorient me. The experience conjures up the same feeling as when I am unexpectedly plunged into darkness: surprise and fear, closely followed by the sober recognition that nothing has happened...yet. I don't know who Hagit would list as her influences. I'd locate her work somewhere between Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Howard Sherman (http://www.howardsherman.com) noted an affinity with the painter, Jean Rustin (http://www.rustin.be/). Nevertheless, if I were going to instruct someone on the gestural aesthetics of dislocation and dark forebodings, I'd set them in front of Barkai's "In Difference 4" or "Blindfold" or one form the "Vomiter" series, while I sought out a double-espresso and happy, canned jazz at my local coffee bar.

You might be tempted to criticize the art works in this show as hyperbolic, but are they really? In what we deem "Reality" in various cultures throughout the world, women inject the lethal toxin botulism, popularly known as Botox, into their bodies. They insert metal plates in their lips, have their necks artificially extended, and have their clitorises removed, all to achieve their local culture's idea of "good enough". In the conversation on feminism and womanhood, that kind of reality doesn't leave an artist much room either symbolically or metaphorically. In this show, I like each artist's tone. It's neither too subtle for my eye to see nor too shrill for my ear.

Kudos to the curator, Lindsey Peyton. I'm not sure how she knew to bring these three artist together, but I'm glad she did. The works are nicely intermingled: Hagit's pale nude woman with her head obscured by an ochre blotch adjacent to Jacobi's video of herself applying her jewelry; Devine's bikini's chorus lining in front of Barkai's "Indifference" series of men and women huddling/embracing with Jacobi's "Breast Sac" (vaseline filled nylon sacks) looming off to the side. The thoughtful arrangement ensures that the works compliment each other rather than compete.

...sometimes, defiance is beautiful.

SpaceTaker Announcement: Additional Support

2010-05-31T04:22:00Z

Spacetaker’s new gallery space features group exhibit: Additional Support
Artist Resource Center (ARC) Features Artists Hagit Barkai, Kelley Devine, and Jessica Jacobi During May

HOUSTON (May 4, 2010) - This May, the Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center (ARC) will host "Additional Support," a group exhibition featuring paintings by Hagit Barkai, body casting sculptures by Kelley Devine and small metal sculptures by Jessica Jacobi. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 9 PM on Saturday, May 15th, complete with a fashion show of the wearable works and a live body casting demonstration. The show will remain on display through June 19th, and the public is invited without charge. The featured artists are currently Houston residents and were chosen to exhibit together due to their respective works’ treatment of the human form.

About Additional Support:

Support: to be capable of bearing; withstand.

The body demands support due to numerous physical and psychical circumstances. As the body progresses through it’s lifetime, its natural framework is challenged, and the need for additional support is revealed through the body’s awkwardness, vulnerability, and visceral nature. In response, individuals and society create various tools to hide, enhance, or transform the body (i.e. undergarments, piercings, etc.), enabling it to function in an acceptable way within society. Additional Support explores possible manifestations of such creations– if a body accepts society’s methods of support, is the body in turn accepted by society? The work demonstrates tension between acceptance of and repulsion to the body, calling into question the motivations behind such judgments and redefining the notion of “misfit.” In exploring the body’s incongruence with its surroundings, the three bodies of work represent failed attempts to reconcile the physical image of the body with self-image. The exhibition also plays with the artwork’s need for support to assume meaning: from the video and performances supporting the wearable art and the cast hangers giving a sense of the missing body, to the paintings negotiations with the frame.

About the Artists:
Jessica Jacobi’s small metal sculptures are designed to question methods for defining acceptable body conditions. Originally from Houston, she received her B.F.A. in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and her M. F. A. in Metals and Jewelry Design from Texas Tech University. She has exhibited at national juried exhibitions -- from Elder Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska to Meadows Gallery at the Center for the Visual Arts in Denton, Texas. She exhibited in 2008 Craft Texas show at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and her works have also been displayed at Runnels Gallery, Eastern New Mexico State University and Landmark Arts Studio Gallery at Texas Tech University School of Art.

Kelley Devine studied sculpture and visual arts at Southeastern Louisiana University and has now exhibited at various shows from Jonathan Ferrera Gallery in New Orleans and SLU Visual Arts Society Exhibitions in Hammond, La. to Galleria Lazzara and Sculptures by Design Studio in Houston. Devine describers herself as “a mother, artist, entrepreneur and student” and says her art helps her communicate what she sees as the opposing forces within the human psyche. “As a painter and a sculptor, I strive to incorporate the concept of how self-perception and internalization differs from the perceptions and assumptions of others, by combining materials, applications or images that are visually and psychologically contrary to one another.”
Originally from Israel, Hagit Barkai received an MFA degree from Penn State University, a B.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and also studied at the Jerusalem Studio School. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Praxis Gallery, New York; Houston Art League; Chashama, Gallery, New York ; Crane Gallery, Philadelphia; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh; and the Pennsylvania State Museum, in Harrisburg. She has been featured in the Houston Chronicle; the Pittsburgh City Paper, and in Research Penn State. Awards include the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in Visual Arts in 2008, first place for the Visual Arts in the Graduate Research Exhibition at Penn State University in 2007, a travel grant to Israel from The School of Visual Arts at Penn State in 2006, and being selected to represent Penn State in the Big Ten Conference in Chicago in 2006.
Barkai said she looks at “body languages of vulnerability, awkwardness and misfits as expressions that move between acceptance and resistance.” She seeks to maintain balance between one’s struggles to gain visibility and struggles to escape it. “I paint bodies for what they fail to be, for how they fail to settle in any image or concept that confine and regulate them, and for how they are never able to close the gap between appearance and experience,” the artist explains. “I am painting in an attempt to capture this moment of losing and gaining respectability.
For more information about Spacetaker, visit the www.spacetaker.org.
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About Spacetaker:
Spacetaker is a 501(c)3 professional organization and Artist Resource Center located in Houston’s First Ward whose mission it to provide artists and small non-profits access to economic development, continuing education, and networking opportunities to support their professional growth. Spacetaker is located at 2101 Winter Street, Studio B11 Houston 77007.
www.spacetaker.org

ConcealDisclose Sets Up Unlikely Dialogue, by Douglas Britt

2009-05-08T03:00:00Z

Painter Hagit Barkai has lived in Houston only since September. But when ConcealDisclose , her two-person exhibition with photographer Tala Vahabzadeh, opens tonight at Art League Houston, she’ll already have fulfilled a dream that might have been difficult to realize in her native country, Israel.“I’m really happy to be showing work with an Iranian artist,” Barkai said of Vahabzadeh, a master’s-degree candidate at the University of Houston who is from Tehran. “One of the things that I really love about being in America is that I can meet those people who are considered my enemies. It’s a friendly environment, and a conversation is possible.”

For now, an in-person conversation will have to wait, because Vahabzadeh is back in Iran caring for her sick father. But the exhibit, curated by Beth Secor, will set up a dialogue between the works of two artists whose output, at first glance, appears to have little in common. Barkai is mostly showing works from her Every Body Knows series, in which naked figures, sometimes blindfolded, are depicted sitting, kneeling, vomiting or undressing in what appear to be harsh conditions of confinement.

Vahabzadeh’s photographs are self-portraits of the artist, fully veiled, in various scenarios. In one work, she eats an apple in a gardenlike setting while wearing a mask that depicts a face of innocence associated with Persian miniatures on top of her head. In another, she’s perched high in a tree — a reference to an Iranian joke that compares veiled women to black crows.

“(Vahabzadeh) is all covered up in the veil, and she talks about how wearing that veil makes her act differently than she really is, and how she’s trying to reveal what’s underneath it,” Secor said. In Barkai’s work, “everybody is completely uncovered and revealed, and yet there are still hidden aspects to what’s happened to these people. You can read about them and know what it’s about, but they’re also really enigmatic and mysterious, so I like that juxtaposition.”

To American viewers, Barkai’s paintings might seem reminiscent of photos released during the Iraq War documenting abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners. But Barkai said she began work on the series for her thesis project at Penn State University shortly after returning from Israel, where she had been during the 2006 war with Lebanon.

“I had all these opinions about Israel and criticisms about what my government is doing,” she said. “I wanted to create this process where I can feel the violations that are done in the name of my well-being. I wanted to feel what it is to go through this.”

In each painting, Barkai worked from photos she had taken of a variety of models, so that each picture depicts a composite figure rather than a specific person.

“It’s about moving between the feeling of being exposed and hiding,” she said.

Barkai said she has no expectations for how viewers should respond to her paintings.

“I wouldn’t tell them what to see,” she said. “I just hope they come and they say the truth about what they think about it.”

douglas.britt@chron.com

Art and politics mix powerfully in Fe Gallery's Pinky Swear, by Savannah Guz

2008-07-19T02:50:00Z

Pittsburgh City Paper JULY 17, 2008 SAVANNAH GUZ

While contemporary art has long inclined toward personal expression and individual concerns, current events have inspired many artists to politicize their aesthetic and conceptual approaches. These artists, moreover, have gone beyond exploring subcultures and bringing little-recognized wrongs to light. Now they've taken up unswerving, no-holds barred criticism of the prevailing socio-political system. We haven't seen this kind of concentrated anti-war effort in the art world since Dada. While this is a strong statement to make, Fe Gallery's exhibition Pinky Swear: A Political Exhibition Addressing Promises is worthy of it.

The Urban Dictionary defines a "pinky swear" as an eternally binding promise made by two people hooking pinky fingers together. Breaking the promise is supposed to result in the offender losing his or her pinky. Curator Vicky A. Clark unites this concept of pledges with political commentary. The exhibition features works by members of Group A, an association founded in 1944 and credited with establishing the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

While all of Pinky Swear's works speak out against America's present political course, some are more searing in their condemnations than others. Perhaps the most conceptually compelling is Bob Ziller's 2007 sculpture "Trophy." It directly addresses the issue of broken promises, particularly those relating to the Geneva Conventions and the writ of habeas corpus, meant to prevent unlawful detention. Composed of a rusty shovel head mounted on a concrete cylinder, "Trophy" bears the scratched silhouette of the now-iconic hooded and wired Abu Ghraib prisoner Satar Jabar. The aggressive method by which the image was created -- by scraping away the shovel's surface -- and the conceptually shrewd use of the shovel itself contribute to the work's power: Shovels are funerary implements crucial to burial. They also imply hole-digging, both ideological and literal.

Hagit Barkai's oil on canvas "The Waiter" (2007), which depicts a near-faceless, naked figure apparently bound and seated on a wooden bench, and Judy Charlson's undated raku bas reliefs "Hanging Out in Baghdad" all deal with confinement, torture and the paradox of "forced democratization" on a more visceral level.

Another conceptual jewel is Wendy Osher's "Invisible Bridge," made from wire, rubber bands, chewing gum and newsprint. These materials, respectively associated with quick fixes and propaganda, would not bear the weight of a toy soldier. Yet the construction lingers above viewers, presenting letter-for-letter the Bush administration's comfortless message: "Stay the Course."

Paula Weiner's mixed-media work "Sedition Flag" depicts an American flag behind Plexiglas on which she has written: "Our Country 'tis of thee has secrets thou shalt never see." Alongside are citations from the 1917 Espionage Act -- implying the 1918 Sedition Act, which made speaking out against the government treasonous. Although the Sedition Act was repealed in 1921, Weiner points out that parts of the Espionage Act remain law.

Ultimately, Pinky Swear speaks to more than broken promises. It also reflects our tendency toward continuous, soul-sedating consumption. Witness Steve Hasley's "Toxic Iconography #1," featuring pretend explosives sheathed in Wal-Mart bags, and Jennifer L. Dinovitz's mixed-media medicine cabinet in "Hard Pill to Swallow."

There is much food for thought in Clark's exhibition and more complexity than can be explored here. Because the artists' passion is obvious, their messages compelling and their political engagement genuinely exciting, the exhibition is certain to stay with visitors long after they've left the gallery. The show's value, with its implicit call to think critically, goes beyond political appraisals. And while there is certainly the aforementioned whiff of Dada -- which revolutionized how art was used as a means of constructive dissent -- in Pinky Swear, the artists' dissent involves no gratuitous aesthetic anarchy or baffling logic. The messages are well reasoned, historically anchored and unequivocal.

Pinky Swear: A Political Exhibition Addressing Promises continues through Aug. 1. Fe Gallery, 4102 Butler St., Lawrencevillle. 412-860-6028

CAA NAMES 2007 FELLOWS

2008-01-09T03:55:00Z

This past year, CAA awarded two grants and four honorable mentions through the Professional Development Fellowship Program.

CAA initiated the program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By offering financial assistance to promising MFA and PhD students, CAA can assist the rising generation during this important transitional period in their lives.

Unlike previous years in which CAA fellowships were awarded in two parts—$5,000 to the fellows at the outset and $10,000 to an employer (with a matching requirement) upon the recipients securing a professional position—fellows are now honored with a one-time grant of $15,000 to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for their job-search expenses or purchasing materials for their studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best nurture artists and scholars at the beginning of their professional careers.

Both fellows and honorable mentions receive free one-year CAA memberships and complimentary registration to CAA’s Annual Conference.

2007 Fellow in Visual Art

Hagit Barkai is an MFA student in visual arts at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, where she is currently working on her thesis show, Every Body Knows. An Israeli native, Barkai received a BA in philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and studied painting and drawing at the Jerusalem Studio School.

Viewing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai reflects somatic experiences in her work, seeing them as political, social, and psychological symbols. The bodies in her paintings are confined within the frame in unstable and uncomfortable positions. Her work focuses on conflicts regarding identities, morality, and difference, which are embodied through demands addressed to the body in public and personal spaces. She is influenced by cultural critics such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, and by artists such as Hannah Wilke, Mona Hatoum, and Marlene Dumas.

Barkai’s paintings have been exhibited at Chashama Gallery in New York and at the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg. Her painting represented Pennsylvania State University at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago, Illinois. At Penn State, she received a first-place award in the university-wide Graduate Research Exhibition; a travel grant to Israel from the University’s School of Visual Arts; and a painting commission from the Alumni Association.